Contamination of seismicity catalogs by quarry blasts: An example from İstanbul and its vicinity, northwestern Turkey

Gündüz Horasan*, Aysun Boztepe Güney, Ayşegül Küsmezer, Feyza Bekler, Zafer Öǧütçü, Nebiye Musaoǧlu

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

56 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Scientists have proposed two fault systems of different ages in the Sea of Marmara: the Thrace-Eskişehir Fault Zone of Early Miocene-Early Pliocene age and the North Anatolian Fault Zone of Late Pliocene-Recent age. Different seismicity rates and extensions of these faults onto land near İstanbul have been suggested. One of the reasons for these differences is the contamination of seismicity catalogs by seismic events from quarries operated in İstanbul and its vicinity, including Gaziosmanpaşa (Cebeci and Kemerburgaz), Çatalca, Ömerli, Gebze, and Hereke. In this study, we investigated waveforms of 179 seismic events (1.8 < Md < 3.0) from the KOERI, NEMC digital database. We determined differences between earthquakes and quarry blasts based on time- and frequency-domain analyses of their seismograms (amplitude peak ratio, power ratio, and spectral amplitude ratio) and used these differences as discriminants. The results of this study indicate that 15% and 85% of the investigated seismic events are earthquakes and quarry blasts, respectively.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)90-99
Number of pages10
JournalJournal of Asian Earth Sciences
Volume34
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 5 Jan 2009

Funding

We thank Boğaziçi University Research Fund (Project No: 05T202). We thank all members of National Earthquake Monitoring Center of Turkey (NEMC) for making available the epicentral parameters. We thank Prof. Dr. Boris Natalin and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive reviews and suggestions. The Generic Mapping Tools, GMT, ( Wessel and Smith, 1995 ), ERDAS ( Pouncey et al., 1999 ), ARCGIS 9 ( Crosier et al., 2004 ) were used for mapping.

FundersFunder number
Boğaziçi Üniversitesi05T202

    Keywords

    • İstanbul
    • Quarry blast
    • Seismicity

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