Absence of Near-Trench Early Triggering during the 2012 Mw 7.2 Indian Ocean Strike-Slip Earthquake: Evidence from One-Day Aftershocks

Dynamic earthquake triggering is a widely accepted mechanism of earthquake interaction, which plays a vital role in seismic hazard estimation, although its efficacy at regional distances is under debate. The 2012 Mw 7.2 Indian Ocean event is one of the first reported events to produce dynamic stress triggering at regional distances using backprojection (BP) techniques. Alternatively, the coherent radiators in BP images can be interpreted as localized water reverberation phases. We present further evidence against near-trench triggering during this event. We collected 24 hr seismic recordings of two nearby stations located near the trench. We adopted a waveform denoising algorithm and detected 125 aftershocks using two regional seismic stations with a minimum magnitude of ML - 2.7 and completeness magnitude of ML - 3.6, whereas none of these aftershocks occurred near the trench. The absence of immediate (within one day) aftershocks near the trench suggest the absence of dynamic triggering during the offshore mainshock.