Tomographic imaging of the earthquake rupture process

To advance our understanding of the earthquake rupture process, we must develop methods that will map observations into the space‐time variation of seismic moment release on the fault plane. While the temporal history of overall moment release is relatively easy to obtain from P‐waves, there has been no objective quantitative method available to directly determine the spatial variation in moment release. The theoretical connection between spatially varying moment release and the resultant seismogram is a linear integral relationship (specifically, a Radon transform). This paper outlines a linear inverse method that provides a high‐resolution tomographic image of the space‐time varying moment density function. Application of the method to P‐waves from the large 1976 Mindanao earthquake demonstrates the ability of this method to reliably extract coherent pulses of moment release in space and time.