This data repository for the Southern Caribbean and NW South America contains a 3D thermal model computed down to 75 km depth, the modelled hypocentral temperatures and geothermal gradients at the locations of crustal earthquakes, and the crustal seismogenic depths calculated from earthquake statistics, as well as the associated modelled temperatures.
We used the uppermost 75 km of the gravity-constrained structural and density model of Gómez-García et al. (2020, 2021) to derive the 3D thermal configuration of the study area (5°-15° N, 63°-82° W). A steady-state approach was followed, in which upper and lower boundary conditions were set to run the thermal calculations using the software GOLEM (Cacace & Jacquey, 2017; Jacquey & Cacace, 2017).
A catalogue of earthquakes occurred within the study area and surroundings was compiled from public sources. In the database archived here, we provide data of the best located crustal earthquakes within the boundaries of this area, from January 1980 to June 2021. Earthquakes below the magnitude of completeness, or with poorly determined depths, were disregarded. Earthquakes were deemed crustal if their hypocentres were located between the topo-bathymetry from the GEBCO relief (Weatherall et al., 2015) and the Moho depth from the GEMMA model (Reguzzoni & Sampietro, 2015).
We computed the crustal seismogenic depth as the 90th and 95th percentiles (D90 and D95), respectively, of the crustal hypocentral depths. These percentiles were mapped on a latitude-longitude grid, using for each grid node at least the 20 closest earthquakes as sample.
The hypocentral temperatures, the geothermal gradient at the earthquake locations, and the temperatures at the D90 and D95 surfaces were calculated from the lithospheric-scale thermal model. For more details about the modelling approach and interpretation of the results, we kindly ask the reader to refer to the main publication: Gomez-Garcia et al. (2023).
This data repository contains the 3D steady-state thermal field computed for the South Caribbean and NW South America down to 75 km depth, the modelled hypocentral temperatures, the depths to the upper and lower stability transitions, as well as the seismogenic thickness calculated from selected earthquakes of the ISC Bulletin (International Seismological Centre, 2022). All methodological details can be found in the main publication (see section 2).
We used the uppermost 75 km of the gravity-constrained structural and density model of Gómez-García et al. (2020, 2021) to derive the 3D thermal configuration of the study area. A steady-state approach was followed, in which upper and lower boundary conditions were set to run the thermal experiments using the software GOLEM (Cacace & Jacquey, 2017; Jacquey & Cacace, 2017).
We selected earthquakes from the ISC Bulletin from January 1980 to January 2021 (International Seismological Centre, 2022), considering the magnitude of completeness for different periods, removing earthquakes without depth, set as 0 km or fixed, as well as those with reported hypocentral depth errors >30 km. Of this set, we selected the crustal earthquakes, located between the topo-bathymetry from the GEBCO relief (Weatherall et al., 2015) and the Moho depth from the GEMMA model (Reguzzoni & Sampietro, 2015), interpolated to a resolution of 5 km. From this earthquake subset we computed the upper and lower stability transitions for seismogenesis, as the 10th and 90th percentiles (D10 and D90), respectively, of the hypocentral depths. These percentiles were mapped on a latitude-longitude grid, using for each grid node its 20 closest earthquakes as sample.
The hypocentral temperatures and the temperatures at the D10 and D90 crustal depths were calculated from the lithospheric-scale thermal model. Lastly, the crustal seismogenic thickness was computed as the difference between D90 and D10 for each grid node. For more details about the modelling approach and interpretation of the results, we kindly ask the reader to refer to the main publication: Gomez-Garcia et al., (2022).