The effect of global seismicity on the polar motion of a viscoelastic Earth

Abstract

We evaluate the polar drift of a stratified viscoelastic Earth, generated by 20 years of global seismicity (from the Centroid Moment Tensor catalog, 1977–1997). Our estimate is better than that of Soldati and Spada [1999] because it accounts for the effects, previously neglected, of earthquakes at depths larger than 80 km. In fact, we show that deep focus and intermediate‐depth focus seismic events tend to affect the Earth's inertia tensor more significantly than shallow ones; specifically, we find that the mean rate of polar drift (evaluated over a 6‐year time interval immediately following the seismic event) due to a vertical dip‐slip source at the bottom of the asthenosphere (280 km depth in our model) is 5 times larger than that generated by an analogous source, located at the boundary between lithosphere and asthenosphere (80 km depth). We conclude, nevertheless, that global seismic activity is not able to alter significantly the rotational parameters of the Earth: according to our computations, the changes that it induces in the inertia tensor result in an average polar drift that is still significantly smaller than the observed one.