1. Introduction
Electromagnetic observation is one of the useful geophysical methods utilized in - searching for seismic precursors. Electromagnetic emissions, through ground-based observation, have been reported prior to numerous strong earthquakes (EQs) worldwide, including the 1964 Great Alaska 9.2 EQ [
1], the 1989 Loma Prieta 7.1 EQ [
2,
3], the 1988 Spitak 6.9 EQ [
4,
5], the 1993 Guam 8.0 EQ [
6,
7], the 2008 Wenchuan 8.0 EQ [
8,
9,
10], and the 2011 Japan 9.0 EQ [
11]. As the development of Earth observation from space, satellite experiments, due to their large coverage of seismic belts worldwide, fast speed, and high resolution, have gained increasing attention. At the same time, Earth observation from satellites is also characterized by the fact that all satellites have their own revisiting periods. For instance, this period is 5 days for the CSES (China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite). Additionally, this leads to a discontinuous measurement of a fixed area, and the observation is dependent on local time (LT). On the one hand, ionospheric abnormities associated with strong EQs have been presented in an increasing number of studies, which have mainly focused on EQ case studies [
12,
13,
14,
15] and statistical work aiming to reveal the complete temporal-spatial evolution characteristics of plasma variations related to seismic activities [
8,
16,
17,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22].
On the other hand, combined with ground-based data, investigations of lithosphere-atmosphere-ionosphere coupling (LAIC) models and mechanisms have been developing at an unprecedented rate [
9,
23,
24,
25,
26,
27,
28,
29]. The primary study of the LAI coupling mechanism is based on two major hypotheses, namely, the internal gravity wave (IGW) and electric field. In recent years, thermal anomalies, such as ground latent flux and ongoing longwave radiation (OLR), have also been proposed as candidates to interpret the possible mechanism of LAI coupling but lack a well-established model [
30]. However, Sorokin and Hayakawa [
29] considered that there are some difficulties in the interpretation of observational results of EQ precursors based on the model of IGW propagation due to its propagation properties. Thus, Pulinets and Davidenko [
31] argued that it is the smooth transition from acoustic-driven mechanisms to EM coupling. The reason for this is very simple: recently, the acoustic coupling mechanism has shown very low effectiveness, meaning that it is difficult to produce an order of the ionospheric perturbations which are observed before EQs in reality. The LAI coupling model proposed by Kuo et al. [
32,
33] shows that a current originating from the stressed rock in the focal zone propagates along the magnetic lines from the epicenter area of an earthquake via the ionosphere to its magnetically conjugate point, causing electromagnetic disturbances on the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, and in the ionosphere and its conjugate point, in that order.
However, the mechanism of earthquakes associated with electromagnetic signals has always been a debated issue that is subject to controversy, since seismo-electromagnetic emissions are presented. Thus far, several theories have been proposed to interpret this mechanism. These include electrokinetic and magnetohydrodynamic effects, piezomagnetism, microfracturing, etc., acting on the production mechanism beneath the Earth [
34,
35,
36,
37], and chemical channels [
38,
39,
40], acoustic channels [
41,
42,
43], electromagnetic channels [
24,
25], etc., acting on the propagating mechanism in the air as the energy for LAIC. Whatever the production and propagating mechanism is, we must acknowledge that all these properties are attributed to the geodynamics of the Earth; that is, all these phenomena have a close relationship with seismic fault activities. Seismic fault activities are characterized by focal mechanisms involving EQ-related information, such as the strike, dip, and slip of the main fault [
44,
45]. Among them, slip plays a predominated role in describing fault action styles and determining the impending EQ types, such as normal-fault, reverse-fault, and strike-slip.
In this work, we attempt to statistically investigate the seismo-ionospheric effects of different types of strong EQs. The data utilized in this investigation and the data processing method are introduced in
Section 2. In
Section 3, the statistical seismo-ionospheric influence results for different types of EQs determined using different datasets derived from the CSES and the DEMETER satellites are exhibited. Additionally, an attempt to confirm these results using randomly generated EQs and commonly detected ones is discussed in
Section 4. The discussion and conclusion are provided in
Section 5.
3. Statistical Seismo-Ionospheric Influence
Taking focal mechanism information into consideration, with differences between various earthquake types, there are usually three types of earthquakes: normal-fault, reverse-fault and strike-slip, defined in light of the three parameters of strike, dip, and slip [
44,
45].
Here, there were only 120 normal-fault EQs among 797 EQs during the DEMETER period and 69 among 366 EQs during the CSES period. A small number of samples could not provide a firm result for our topic. For this reason, each good detection dataset was simply divided into two groups, mainly according to a slip range: strike-slip earthquakes (λ = 0–45°, 136–225°, and 316–360°) and rupture earthquakes (λ = 46–135° reverse-fault and 226–315° normal-fault), including 324 and 473 for DEMETER and 162 and 204 for CSES, respectively. First, we detected whether or not each type of EQ corresponded to one or more than one perturbation within an epicentral distance of 1500 km, with 15 d as the time delay before the EQ. We defined several parameters determined earlier by Li and Parrot [
8,
20], as follows: Ne is the total number of earthquakes, Ng is the number of good detections, which is equal to the number of earthquakes detected, and Np is the number of true alarms, which is equal to the number of perturbations detected. The corresponding values of these parameters for all datasets are displayed in
Table 2.
Secondly, we calculated the detection rate
r and the averaged perturbation number
n for all the good detections of each type of considered event. Before this step,
n is the average number of corresponding perturbations for each EQ detected, and it is equal to Np divided by Ng, while the detection rate
r is the ratio between the detected EQs and all the input EQs. The specified results of
n and
r derived from
Table 2 are presented in
Table 3.
For ease of comparison, the data in
Table 3 are shown in
Figure 2 and
Figure 3, respectively, for the averaged perturbation number
n and the detection rate
r in the form of histograms.
From
Table 3 and
Figure 2, one point we can obtain is that the averaged ionospheric perturbation number of rupture EQs (light grey bars) is a little higher than that generated by strike-slip EQs (light purple bars) for all datasets, which means, on average, rupture EQs probably induce ionospheric variations more easily. Additionally, from
Table 3 and
Figure 2, another point is that, for a given group EQs, for example, the rupture EQs, the perturbation number determined by ion density of IAP on DEMETER (or PAP on CSES) is larger than that of electron density of ISL on DEMETER (or LAP on CSES). It is available for other groups of EQs, too. This result leads to a conclusion that the ion density is more sensitive to seismic activities than the electron density.
However, from
Table 3 and
Figure 3, the detection rates of strike-slip EQs are higher than that of rupture EQs determined by datasets PAP-3s, LAP-3s and ISL-4s. These results tend to indicate that the strike-slip EQs are detected more easily than rupture ones but this conclusion has not been testified by the IAP-4s dataset, which is of a contrary result that the detection rate determined by strike-slip EQs is a little lower than that of rupture ones.
5. Discussion and Conclusions
From the work outlined above, it seems that rupture EQs (normal-fault EQs and reverse-fault EQs) can prompt more plasma variations than strike-slip EQs. The fact that seismic precursors have a close relationship with focal tectonic backgrounds has been subject to much investigation. As early as 1984, Mogi [
56] reported that simple shear movements of faults at a low stress level in California led to less earthquake precursors, while more precursors occurred in the small-scale plate subduction belt in Japan and large-scale intra-plates in China due to high stress levels. On the basis of this work, Mei [
57] proposed a theory of rare precursors prior to strike-slip EQs and many precursors to brittle events in light of their different focal mechanisms in China. This conclusion was further testified by Zhang et al. [
58], who found that the number of precursors for rupture EQs was larger than that for strike-slip shocks among 31 EQs with a magnitude
MS equal to or more than 5.0 that occurred in southwest China. Using total electron content (TEC) measurements, Cahyadi [
59] investigated ionospheric responses to the 26 December 2004 Andaman Sumatra EQ, 11 April 2012 North off Sumatra EQ, and 7 December 2012 North Japan EQ, with different high-angle reverse-fault, strike-slip, and normal-fault focal mechanisms, respectively. The results showed that the initial positive TEC changes in the reverse and normal faults and positive and negative variations in the strike-slip EQs reflect differences in co-seismic vertical crustal displacements. Our statistical results agree well with these previous studies.
To understand this conclusion, we can apply the Mohr-Coulomb (MC) failure criterion and Byerlee law, which are usually utilized to interpret two types of rock failure: fracture and stick-slip [
58]. The MC criterion was contributed by Mohr and Coulomb [
60]. Fracture means the instability and failure of an intact rock, and the principal stress σ must be beyond the failure strength of rock itself [
61]. This process complies with the MC failure criterion and mainly leads to rupture EQs, while stick-slip occurs in the previous planes of failed faults, and this movement must predominately surmount the shear stress τ between the planes of a fault. Most strike-slip EQs are attributed to this process. The Coulomb failure criterion line is always beyond Byerlee law line in the plane, as determined by the normal stress σ and the shear stress τ, which means that the stress level of rock rupture is generally higher than that of the rock’s stick-slip strength. Strong stress level can release more energy and yield more precursory information [
58].
However, the movement of faults is complex. Mogi [
56] also considered that precursors for small-scale subductions in Japan are clearly observable but accumulate within a small range compared with the wide-ranging precursors induced by stick-slip between large-scale planes. This means that a strike-slip EQ can induce ionospheric precursors in a wider area, while a rupture one induces precursory perturbations in an area near to the epicenter. In this sense, it is possible that strike-slip EQs have a higher detection rate but a lower ionospheric number, as we showed in
Section 3, but this conclusion is not further specified in this paper. It has been reported that the detection rate of EQs can be affected by different factors, such as the magnitude, hyper-central depth, location, and so on [
8,
20,
22]. Thus, it is also possible that the type of EQ considered does not play a predominant role in this period. At the same time, the scale of seismic faults is also a factor that affects the appearance range of precursors prior to strong EQs. Liu et al. [
62] showed that the extreme ionospheric reductions and enhancements extended the spatial distribution by approximately 1650 km in latitude and 2850 km in longitude, respectively, from the 12 May 2008 Wenchuan epicenter. Here, we limit the distance
D to 1500 km from the epicenters of the events. Moreover, we simply divide all the EQs meeting the conditions into two groups in light of their slip ranges, i.e., strike-slip EQs and rupture EQs, due to the lower number of normal-fault EQs. Hence, we expect that further research based on increased numbers of samples and details will help us to reveal more evidence on this topic.
However, Chen et al. [
63] showed that the situation is more complex. Complex physical processes contribute to the generation of ionospheric precursors. Among the possible sources of variability, it is necessary to consider the geological structure of the region of study and, in particular, the structure of the tectonic faults, the source mechanisms of the given earthquakes (slip, thrust, etc.), the sporadic nature or regularity of the emanations from the ground into the atmosphere, the atmospheric (weather) conditions, regular daily variations in the ionosphere parameters, and the observation point positions in relation to the future epicenter position.
Considering the two ionospheric parameters of ionic density and electronic density measured onboard both the DEMETER and the CSES satellites, as well as the two types of EQs, namely, rupture events and strike-slip ones, which took place within a ±45° geographic latitude during the satellite periods, we statistically demonstrated that rupture EQs can have a stronger influence on the ionosphere than strike-slip ones. This conclusion was also further confirmed by randomly generated EQs and EQs commonly detected by CSES, while the condition for DEMETER was slightly different from what we expected when the random list of EQs was used. However, during our work, we also noted that, on the one hand, the EQ catalog derived from the GMT catalog was not complete or not precise during the DEMETER period. Most of the events were Mb and, sometimes, MS. There is no correct estimation regarding the effect of this catalog. On the other hand, the numbers of collected EQs within a ±45° geographic latitude were 797 for DEMETER and 366 for CSES, but their commonly detected EQs were 200 and 218, respectively. As it is well-known that the DEMETER and CSES operate along orbits at different altitudes, it is possible that they have different properties. Hence, further research will be necessary as more data are gained.
From the analysis above, it was shown that the averaged ionospheric number of rupture earthquakes is slightly higher than that obtained for strike-slip events, which indicates that rupture earthquakes tend to have a stronger influence on the ionosphere than strike-slip ones. To confirm this conclusion, the same statistical work was also conducted on earthquakes commonly detected by both electron density and ion density and on random events. The same conclusion was obtained completely for the CSES satellite but only partly for the DEMETER satellite. Moreover, we did not obtain a firm conclusion regarding the detection rates corresponding to these two types of earthquakes. Thus, further investigations will be necessary as more data are collected.
At the same time, one point that we should mention regarding this work period is that, for a fixed satellite, such as the CSES, the statistical seismo-ionospheric influence of the averaged perturbation number or detection rate determined by the PAP O+ density is always larger than that of the LAP electron density. This result is also relevant to another satellite, the DEMETER, according to which it seems that ion density is more sensitive to earthquakes than electron density, but this requires further research.