The hydrological signature of a seismogenic source: coseismic hydrological changes in response to the 1915 Fucino (Central Italy) earthquake

Abstract

The M ∼ 7 1915 Fucino (Central Italy) earthquake represents one of the most destructive seismic events ever occurred in the Italian Peninsula. Several seismogenic faults have been proposed in the past decades as the source of the earthquake by means of different approaches and techniques that lead to a variety of speculations about the source mechanism and the fault location, often contrasting with one another. The 1915 earthquake produced a remarkable data set of 73 coseismic hydrological changes in the near and intermediate field that consist in variation of the flow of streams and springs, liquefaction, rise of water temperature and turbidity. In this paper, we study the coseismic water level changes induced by the 1915 earthquake in the near field to provide convincing clues on the geometry of the earthquake causative fault. We model the coseismic strain field induced by seventeen individual faults proposed through different approaches, and compare its pattern with the distribution of streamflow changes. We find: (i) clues on the most probable geometry of the earthquake causative fault. Best fits between modelled deformation and observed data are displayed by sources (derived by geological or seismological data) that share several distinctive features, as they are ∼135◦-striking, SW-dipping, 25–30-km-long normal faults located along the eastern side of the Fucino basin. These data point to the Serrone Fault and the Parasano Fault as the most likely causative structures and support the hypothesis that the coseismic ruptures observed in the field represented primary surface faulting. On the contrary, our calculations show that the Pescina Fault and the Ventrino Fault are secondary faults from the perspective of the hydrological response. Finally, one of the best scoring potential sources (from geological data) is a multifaulting system that considers the presence, in the central-western part of the basin, of fault splays synthetic and antithetic to the main seismogenic structures; therefore, we infer for these splays a possible active involvement in a 1915-like seismogenic process; (ii) evidence against a number of seismogenic structures that were previously associated with the earthquake. In particular, the plots of coseismic strain induced by sources uniquely derived by macroseismic or geodetic data prove to be inconsistent with the polarities of the hydrological signatures. Also, sources mainly characterized by reverse faulting and/or by right-lateral strike-slip component are discarded and (iii) as a final remark, we maintain that the study of the hydrological signatures of earthquake strain can offer an alternative tool in the investigation of the historical seismicity, to estimate the focal mechanism of major earthquakes capable of giving rise to a consistent data set of hydrological data.