Recurrence of Deep Long-Period Earthquakes beneath the Klyuchevskoi Volcano Group, Kamchatka

—Long-period earthquakes and tremors, on a par with volcano-tectonic earthquakes, are one of two main classes of volcano-seismic activity. It is believed that long-period volcanic seismicity is associated with pressure fluctuations in the magmatic and hydrothermal systems beneath volcanoes and can therefore be used as a precursor of the impending eruptions. At the same time, the physical mechanism of the long-period seismicity is still not fully understood. In this work, we have studied the long-period earthquakes that occur at the crust–mantle boundary beneath the Klyuchevskoi volcanic group in Kamchatka in order to establish their recurrence law—the relationship between the magnitude and frequency of occurrence of the events. In the region under study, the earthquakes pertaining to this type are most numerous and characterize the state of the deep magma reservoir located at the crust–mantle boundary. The changes in the seismic regime in this part of the magmatic system can be one of the early precursors of eruptions. For a more thorough characterization of the frequency–magnitude relationship of the discussed events, we compiled a new catalog of the deep long-period earthquakes based on the matched-filter processing of continuous seismograms recorded by the network stations of the Kamchatka Branch of the Geophysical Survey of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2011–2012. For these earthquakes, we also used a magnitude determination method that provides the estimates close to the moment magnitude scale. The analysis of the obtained catalog containing more than 40 000 events shows that the frequency–magnitude relationships of the earthquakes markedly deviate from the Gutenberg–Richter power-law distribution, probably testifying to the seismicity mechanism and peculiarities of the sources that differ from the common tectonic earthquakes. It is shown that the magnitude distribution of the deep long-period earthquakes is, rather, described by the distributions with characteristic mean values such as the normal or gamma distribution.