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A Strong-Motion Network in the Lower Rhine Embayment (SeFoNiB), Germany

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

	INTRODUCTION

 
More than 20 damaging earthquakes have happened in the past 300 years in the Lower Rhine Embayment (LRE), a young sedimentary basin with typical intraplate seismicity (Hinzen and Reamer forthcoming). The most recent damaging earthquakes were those of Alsdorf, 22 July 2002 (M 4.3; Hinzen 2005) and Roermond, 13 April 1992 (M 5.4; Camelbeeck et al. 1994). The latter had a hypocentral depth of more than 15 km and a sedimentary cover of more than 1 km in the source area. These conditions helped to constrain the damages to a moderate level of approximately 125 million (Bertz 1994). Nevertheless, paleoseismological studies (Camelbeeck and Meghraoui 1998; Vanneste et al. 2001; Vanneste and Verbeeck 2001) show that stronger earthquakes with magnitudes well above 6 have occurred on the border faults of the Roer Valley graben, and the seismotectonic setting— including more than 400 km of active surface-fault traces—has a potential for producing earthquakes with magnitudes up to about 7 (Ahorner 2001; Schmedes et al. 2005; Hinzen and Reamer forthcoming). Very few seismic records at short distances to the fault planes exist in the LRE. The closest nonsaturated records from the Roermond earthquake, for example, were recorded at epicentral distances greater than 50 km. In the aftermath of this earthquake several single strong-motion stations were installed, mainly for surveillance of large power plants; however, these stations operate with outdated 12-bit data acquisition.

In this article, we describe the concept and installation of the new strong-motion network SeFoNiB (figure 1). The acronym is deduced from the German "Seismisches Forschungsnetz Niederrheinische Bucht" (seismic research network Lower Rhine Embayment).

The main conceptual aims of the new network are: 1) adequate coverage of the various sedimentary environments in the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Earthquake Geology Division
Institute for Geology and Mineralogy
Cologne University
Vinzenz-Pallotti-St. 26
51429 Bergisch Gladbach, Germany
hinzen@uni-koeln.de
(K.-G. H.)