Sources of shaking and flooding during the Tohoku-Oki earthquake: A mixture of rupture styles

Oki earthquake. Here we combine deterministic inversion and dynamically guided forward simulation methods to model over one thousand high-rate GPS and strong motion observations from 0 to 0.25 Hz across the entire Honshu Island. Our results display distinct styles of rupture with a deeper generic interplate event ( Mw8.5) transitioning to a shallow tsunamigenic earthquake ( Mw9.0) at about 25 km depth in a process driven by a strong dynamic weakening mechanism, possibly thermal pressurization. This source model predicts many important features of the broad set of seismic, geodetic and seafloor observations providing a major advance in our understanding of such great natural hazards. & 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.