Citizen seismology helps decipher the 2021 Haiti earthquake

E. Calais (1, 2, 3) , S. Symithe (4, 5, 2) , Tony Monfret (3, 2, 6) , B. Delouis (3, 2) , A. Lomax (7) , Françoise Courboulex (3, 2) , Jean Paul Ampuero (3, 2) , Pablo Lara (3, 8) , Quentin Bletery (3, 2) , Jérôme Chèze (3, 2) , Fabrice Peix (3, 2) , Anne Deschamps (3, 2) , Bernard Mercier de Lépinay (3, 2) , B. Raimbault (1) , R. Jolivet (1) , Sylvert Paul (3, 2) , S. St Fleur (5, 2) , D. Boisson (5, 2) , Y. Fukushima (9) , Z. Duputel (10, 11) , L. Xu (12) , L. Meng (12)

1 LGENS - Laboratoire de géologie de l'ENS
2 LMI CARIBACT, URGéo
3 GEOAZUR 7329 - Géoazur
4 Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences [West Lafayette]
5 Faculté des Sciences, Laboratoire URGéo
6 ICM - Institute of Marine Sciences / Institut de Ciències del Mar [Barcelona]
7 ALomax Scientific, Mouans Sartoux
8 Instituto Geofisico Del Perú, Lima, Peru
9 International Research Institute of Disaster Science
10 IPGP (UMR_7154) - Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris
11 OVPF - Observatoire Volcanologique du Piton de la Fournaise
12 EPSS - Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences [Los Angeles]

The August 14, Mw7.2, Nippes earthquake in Haiti occurred within the same fault zone as its devastating, Mw7.0, 2010 predecessor but struck the country when field access was limited by insecurity and conventional seismometers from the national network were inoperative. A network of citizen seismometers installed in 2019 provided near-field data critical to rapidly understand the mechanism of the mainshock and monitor its aftershock sequence. Their real-time data define two aftershock clusters that coincide with two areas of coseismic slip derived from inversions of conventional seismological and geodetic data. Machine learning applied to data from the citizen seismometer closest to the mainshock allows us to forecast aftershocks as accurately as with the network-derived catalog. This shows the utility of citizen science contributing to the understanding of a major earthquake.

Domaines: Géophysique [physics.geo-ph]; Tectonique

E. Calais, S. Symithe, Tony Monfret, B. Delouis, A. Lomax, et al.. Citizen seismology helps decipher the 2021 Haiti earthquake. Science, 2022, ⟨10.1126/science.abn1045⟩. ⟨hal-03609866⟩