New Mexico Geological Society Annual Spring Meeting — Abstracts

The Socorro Seismic Anomaly is an area of elevated seismicity in central New Mexico responsible for 45% of magnitude >2.5 earthquakes in the state. This may be due to inflation of the Socorro Magma Body, an areally extensive body of magma residing at 19km depth. Improved source locations for earthquakes within the Socorro Seismic Anomaly have resulted from the addition of two broadband seismic stations to the existing network, and application of waveform cross-correlation (WCC) methods to improve picking consistency among events within earthquake clusters. The catalog of seismic data used for this project includes ~300 locatable events with magnitude greater than -0.9 in the area from September 1, 2004 to the present. The event locations are estimated using data from the permanent local, eleven-station seismic network as well as two temporary broadband seismic stations (PETR and SNKE) installed during Fall 2005 in the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge. Data from these new stations lead to more accurate earthquake locations and aid in identification of additional events that may have been missed using only data from the permanent network. WCC allows comparison of seismic waveforms to eliminate inconsistencies in user-defined picks, thus reducing hypocentral scatter. The WCC process has been performed on multiple earthquake clusters within the Socorro Seismic Anomaly. Among the structures resolved is a linear feature very closely following the path of the Rio Salado. In this case, many events were shifted by 1-4 kilometers onto this structure. Depths for the events in this region range from 1.3 to 14.6 km.