Researchers use AI to estimate focal mechanism parameters of earthquake

The research team led by Prof. Zhang Jie from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made progress on real-time determination of earthquake focal mechanisms through deep learning. The work was published in Nature Communications. Since there are connections between characteristics of the rupture surface of the source fault and seismic wave radiated by the source, it's vital to monitor the earthquake by immediate determination of the source focal mechanism which is inferred from multiple ground seismic records. However, it's hard to calculate the mechanism from the simple records. The parameters about focal mechanisms are either merely reported or reported after a few minutes or even longer.