Integrated Earthquake Catalog of the Ossetian Sector of the Greater Caucasus

Abstract

This article is the continuation of a study by authors to create the most complete and representative earthquake catalogs with a unified magnitude scale. The catalog created of the Ossetian sector of the Greater Caucasus (the territory of the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania and adjacent areas) was formed by the aggregation of all available data from Soviet, modern Russian, and Georgian catalogs, as well as the data from the International Seismological Centre. The integration was carried out using the author’s approach based on the modified nearest neighbor method. The integrated catalog of the Ossetian sector of the Greater Caucasus contains 16,285 events for the period 1962–2022. For all events, magnitude estimates are reduced to a unified “proxy-MW” scale. The integration of data from various sources made it possible to significantly replenish the beginning of the aftershock sequence of the Racha earthquake with MW = 7.0, which occurred on 29 April 1991. There has been a change in the level of registration over time. Thus, there is a significant lack of events for the periods 1967–1970 and 1988–1991; starting from 1995, the catalog is complete for magnitude 3.2, and since 2005 for magnitude 2.2. The integration of Soviet and modern Russian and Georgian catalogs made it possible to significantly increase the completeness and representativeness of seismic events in the studied Ossetian sector of the Greater Caucasus. This once again demonstrates both the fundamental importance of merging seismic data from global, national, and regional catalogs and the effectiveness of the author’s developed method.