Seismicity and detection/location threshold in the southern Great Basin seismic network

A spatially varying model of the detection/location capabilities of the Southern Great Basin seismic network (SGBSN) has been derived that is based on simple empirical relations and statistics. This permits use of almost all the catalog data gathered; instead of ignoring data that are below the threshold of completeness, a spatially varying threshold model is developed so that subregions having lower completeness levels than the network as a whole can be outlined and the completeness level of each sub-region determined. Such a model is required to unambiguously identify regions that are aseismic due to natural processes rather than to limited detection and/or location capabilities. Accounting for spatial variations in detection/location threshold is also important for studies in which magnitude-frequency distributions are interpreted in terms of source scaling properties. The characteristics of the spatial distribution of earthquakes, where earthquake clusters and aseismic regions locate, appear to be stable at all magnitude levels so that inferences about where strain is being accommodated will be the same whether numbers of earthquakes or strain estimated from seismic moments are examined. For the southern Great Basin region these principal characteristics include clusters at the northern end of the Furnace Creek fault and in the Pahranagat Shear Zone, and a relatively large number of earthquakes in the northern and southeastern portions of the Nevada Test Site. These clusters cover regions much larger than the surface projections of any of the mapped faults. The extent to which seismicity is induced by nuclear testing is unclear. The predominantly aseismic regions include the area west of the Death Valley/Furnace Creek fault system and an almost complete absence of events at Yucca Mountain. Finally, a considerable number of isolated events in the SGBSN catalog cannot be correlated with mapped faults.