A Series of Strong Earthquakes in Chile at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Similarities, Differences, Relationship

In less than six years, three devastating earthquakes with magnitude exceeding 8.0 have occurred over the Chilean subduction zone. These events were quite well recorded by permanent GNSS stations. We used finite element modeling for a spherically symmetric layered Earth and machine learning methods to investigate the geodynamic processes preceding and accompanying the Chilean earthquake sequence. We find that preseismic coupling before all events is strongly correlated with the coseismic slip distribution, while afterslip primarily located around the coseismic slip patches. We also found that large geologic structures of the oceanic plate have a decisive influence on the development of geodynamic processes in the rupture zones of large Chilean earthquakes.