Skip to main content

Changes to magnetic minerals caused by frictional heating during the 1999 Taiwan Chi-Chi earthquake

Abstract

We carried out magnetic mineral analyses of samples from the shallowest major fault zone within the Chelungpu fault system, which is the zone that previous researchers believe slipped during the 1999 Taiwan Chi-Chi earthquake. Our aim was to gain an understanding of the changes to magnetic minerals during the earthquake. Magnetic hysteresis and low-temperature thermal demagnetization measurements showed that high magnetic susceptibilities in the black gouge zone within the major fault zone could be attributed not to fining of ferrimagnetic minerals but, rather, to their abundance. Thermomagnetic analyses indicated that the strata in and around the fault zone originally contained thermally unstable iron-bearing paramagnetic minerals, such as pyrite, siderite, and chlorite. We therefore concluded that frictional heating (>400°C) occurred in the black gouge zone in the major fault zone during the slip of the Chi-Chi earthquake and that the resultant high temperature induced thermal decomposition of paramagnetic minerals to form magnetite, resulting in the observed high magnetic susceptibilities.

References

  • Hirono, T., M. Ikehara, K. Otsuki, T. Mishima, M. Sakaguchi, W. Soh, M. Omori, W. Lin, E. Yeh, W. Tanikawa, and C. Wang, Evidence of frictional melting within disk-shaped black materials discovered from the Taiwan Chelungpu fault system, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L19311, doi:10.1029/2006GL027329, 2006a.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hirono, T., W. Lin, E. Yeh, W. Soh, Y. Hashimoto, H. Sone, O. Matsubayashi, K. Aoike, H. Ito, M. Kinoshita, M. Murayama, S. Song, K. Ma, J. Hung, C. Wang, and Y. Tsai, High magnetic susceptibility of fault gouge within Taiwan Chelungpu fault: Nondestructive continuous measurements of physical and chemical properties in fault rocks recovered from Hole B, TCDP, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L15303, doi:10.1029/2006GL026133, 2006b.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hirono, T., E. Yeh, W. Lin, H. Sone, T. Mishima, W. Soh, Y. Hashimoto, O. Matsubayashi, K. Aoike, H. Ito, M. Kinoshita, M. Murayama, S. Song, K. Ma, J. Hung, C. Wang, Y. Tsai, T. Kondo, M. Nishimura, S. Moriya, T. Tanaka, T. Fujiki, L. Maeda, H. Muraki, T. Kuramoto, K. Sugiyama, and T. Sugawara, Nondestructive continuous physical property measurements of core samples recovered from Hole B, Taiwan Chelungpu-fault Drilling Project, J. Geophys. Res., 112, B07404, doi:10.1029/2006JB004738, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hirono, T., M. Sakaguchi, K. Otsuki, H. Sone, K. Fujimoto, T. Mishima, W. Lin, W. Tanikawa, M. Tanimizu, W. Soh, E. Yeh, and S. Song, Characterization of slip zone associated with the 1999 Taiwan Chi-Chi earthquake: X-ray CT image analyses and microstructural observations of the Taiwan Chelungpu fault, Tectonophysics, 449, 63–84, 2008.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hunt, C. P. and S. K. Banerjee, Thermal demagnetization of lowtemperature SIRM: a new method for magnetic granulometry (abstract), EOS Trans. AGU, 73, 138, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hunt, C. P., S. K. Banerjee, J. M. Han, P. A. Solheid, E. Oches, W. Sun, and T. S. Liu, Rock-magnetic proxies of climate change in the loesspalaeosol sequences of the western Loess Plateau of China, Geophys. J. Int., 123, 232–244, 1995.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ikehara, M., T. Hirono, O. Tadai, M. Sakaguchi, H. Kikuta, T. Fukuchi, T. Mishima, N. Nakamura, K. Aoike, K. Fujimoto, Y. Hashimoto, T. Ishikawa, H. Ito, M. Kinoshita, W. Lin, K. Masuda, T. Matsubara, O. Matsubayashi, K. Mizoguchi, M. Murayama, K. Otsuki, H. Sone, M. Takahashi, W. Tanikawa, M. Tanimizu, W. Soh, and S. Song, Low total and inorganic carbon contents within the Chelungpu fault, Geochem. J., 41, 391–396, 2007.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kano, Y., J. Mori, R. Fujio, H. Ito, T. Yanagidani, S. Nakao, and K. Ma, Heat signature on the Chelungpu fault associated with the 1999 Chi-Chi, Taiwan earthquake, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L14306, doi:10.1029/2006GL026733, 2006.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lachenbruch, A. H., Frictional heating, fluid pressure, and the resistance to fault motion, J. Geophys. Res., 85, 6097–6122, 1980.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ma, K. F., C. T. Lee, Y. B. Tsai, T. C. Shin, and J. Mori, The Chi-Chi Taiwan earthquake: large surface displacements on inland thrust fault, EOS, 80, 605–611, 1999.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ma, K. F., E. E. Brodsky, J. Mori, T. A. Song, and H. Kanamori, Evidence for fault lubrication during the 1999 Chi-Chi, Taiwan, earthquake (Mw7.6), Geophys. Res. Lett., 30, 1244, doi:10.1029/2002GL015380, 2003.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ma, K. F., H. Tanaka, S. Song, C. Wang, J. Hung, Y. Song, E. Yeh, W. Soh, H. Sone, L. Kuo, and H. Wu, Slip zone and energetics of a large earthquake from the Taiwan Chelungpu-fault Drilling Project, Nature, 444, 473–476, 2006.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mishima, T., T. Hirono, W. Soh, M. Ikehara, W. Lin, W. Tanikawa, E. Yeh, S. Song, and C. Wang, Thermal history estimation of the Taiwan Chelungpu Fault using rock-magnetic methods, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L23311, doi:10.1029/2006GL028088, 2006.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ö zdemir, Ö. and D. J. Dunlop, Chemical remanent magnetization during γFeOOH phase transformations, J. Geophys. Res., 98, 4191–4198, 1993.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Özdemir, Ö., D. J. Dunlop, and B. M. Moskowitz, The effect of oxidation on the Verwey transition in magnetite, Geophys. Res. Lett., 20, 1671–1674, 1993.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pan, Y. X., R. X. Zhu, S. K. Banerjee, J. Gill, and Q. Williams, Rock magnetic properties related to thermal treatment of siderite: Behavior and interpretation, J. Geophys. Res., 105, 783–794, 2000.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shin, T. and T. Teng, An overview of the 1999 Chi-Chi, Taiwan, Earthquake, Bull. Seismol. Soc. Am., 91, 895–913, 2001.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sibson, R. H., Interaction between temperature and pore-fluid pressure during earthquake faulting—A mechanism for partial or total stress relief, Nature, 243, 66–68, 1973.

    Google Scholar 

  • Snowball, I. and M. Torii, Incidence and significance of magnetic iron sulphides in Quaternary sediments and soils, in Quaternary Climates, Environments and Magnetism, edited by B. A. Maher and R. Thompson, pp. 199–230, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Tanikawa, W., T. Mishima, T. Hirono, W. Soh, and S. Song, High magnetic susceptibility produced by thermal decomposition of core samples from the Chelungpu fault in Taiwan, Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., 272, 372–381, 2008.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Warne, S. St. J. and D. H. French, The decomposition of anhydrous carbonate minerals in coal and oil shale ashes produced at temperatures of 400 and 575 °C, Thermochimica Acta, 75, 139–149, 1984.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wu, H., K. Ma, M. Zoback, N. Boness, H. Ito, J. Hung, and S. Hickman, Stress orientations of Taiwan Chelungpu-Fault Drilling Project (TCDP) hole-A as observed from geophysical logs, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L01303, doi:10.1029/2006GL028050, 2007.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tetsuro Hirono.

Rights and permissions

Open Access  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Mishima, T., Hirono, T., Nakamura, N. et al. Changes to magnetic minerals caused by frictional heating during the 1999 Taiwan Chi-Chi earthquake. Earth Planet Sp 61, 797–801 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1186/BF03353185

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/BF03353185

Key words