Crustal earthquakes in the Cook Inlet and Susitna region of southern Alaska

Several large (M ≥ 6) earthquakes have occurred in the vicinity of Anchorage, Alaska, within the past century. The presence of the underlying subducting Pacific plate makes it difficult to determine the origin of these older earthquakes as either crustal, slab, or the subduction plate interface. We perform a seismological study of historical and modern earthquakes within the Cook Inlet and Susitna region, west of Anchorage. We first estimate hypocenters for historical large earthquakes in order to assess their likelihood of origin as crustal, slab, or plate interface. We then examine modern crustal seismicity to better understand the style of faulting and the location of active structures, including within (and beneath) the Cook Inlet and Susitna basins. We perform double-couple moment tensor inversions using high frequency body waves (1–10 Hz) for small to moderate (M ≥ 2.5) crustal earthquakes (depth ≤ 30 km) occurring from 2007 to 2017. Our misfit function combines both waveforms differences as well as first-motion polarities in order to obtain reliable moment tensor solutions. The three focus regions—Beluga, upper Cook Inlet, and Susitna—exhibit predominantly thrust mechanisms for crustal earthquakes, indicating an overall compressive regime within the crust that is approximately consistent with the direction of plate convergence. Mechanisms within upper Cook Inlet have strike directions aligned with active anticlines previously identified in Cook Inlet from active-source seismic data. Our catalog of moment tensors is helpful for identifying and characterizing subsurface faults from seismic lineaments and from faults inferred from subsurface images from active-source seismic data.