Conversation

The low frequency signal seems to be normal Rayleigh surface waves, but their large amplitude relative to the P and S body waves probably indicate a very shallow source.
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If the body-waves are observable does that mean a magnitude could be estimated? Given that the Rayleigh waves are incredibly high amplitude I suppose the surface-wave magnitude will grossly overestimate the true magnitude.
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Good questions! A simple body wave M may underestimate and simple surface wave M may overestimate, but a waveform-based moment-tensor inversion type M for the surface waves may confirm shallow depth and produce a usefully accurate M...
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Some more evidence here. I remember seeing a talk at EGU a few years ago by Goran Ekstrom (who now partly runs the Global CMT project) and he showed their automatic surface detections show additional events from landslides, glacier calving etc not detected by NEIC etc
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When I first saw how widely observed the event was I was trying to get my head around what type of event (which was at the time I believed was non-seismic) must have been >M5.5 - I did find it at Hawaii too, which is an close to antipodal as you can get (17,700km or 158 degrees)
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