Unexpected earthquake of June 25th, 2015 in Madiun, East Java

Abstract

An earthquake with magnitude 4.2 struck Madiun and its vicinity on June 25, 2015. According to Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG), the earthquake occurred at 10:35:29 GMT+7 and was located in 7.73° S, 111.69 ° E, with a depth of 10 km. At least 57 houses suffered from light to medium damages. We reprocessed earthquake waveform data to obtain an accurate hypocenter location. We manually picked P- and S-waves arrival times from 12 seismic stations in the eastern part of Java. Earthquake location was determined by using Hypoellipse code that employs a single event determination method. Our inversion is able to resolve the fix-depth and shows that the earthquake occurred at 10:35:27.6 GMT+7 and was located in 7.6305° S, 111.7529 ° E with 14.81 km focus depth. Our location depicts a smaller travel time residual compared to that based on the BMKG result. Focal mechanism of the earthquake was determined by using HASH code. We used first arrival polarity of 9 seismic records with azimuthal gap less than 90°, and estimated take-off angles by using assumption of homogenous medium. Our focal mechanism solution shows a strike-slip mechanism with strike direction of 163o, which may be related to a strike-fault in Klangon, an area to the east of Madiun.