Harvard Seismology: Centroid-Moment Tensor Project

Centroid-Moment-Tensor (CMT) solutions are produced on a routine basis for events with moment magnitudes (M_W) greater than about 5.5. CMT solutions are published yearly in Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors; you can access the CMT Catalog from here as well. Quick CMTs are produced in near-real time and distributed to interested parties via email; you can also view a map of recent quick CMTs. If you would like to be included in the distribution list for Quick CMTs, send us email.

You can view a gallery of figures related to the CMT project.

Active participants in this project are Göran Ekström, Adam Dziewonski, Natasha Maternovskaya, and Meredith Nettles.

The Harvard CMT Project is supported by the National Science Foundation grant EAR-0207608.

• Contribution of the Sumatra earthquake to the cumulative, global moment release ; (PDF version)

• Seismic swarm near the Nicobar Islands

  • Quick CMTs 2005/01/26-2005/01/28 07:49

  • Quick CMTs for swarm with background seismicity from CMT catalog

Recent Developments

• We have extended the CMT analysis to smaller earthquakes by analyzing teleseismic intermediate period surface waves (Arvidsson and Ekström, 1998).
• We have analyzed the larger earthquakes in the 1997 Umbria-Marche (central Italy) sequence using a new method of surface wave CMT analysis (Ekström et al., 1998).
• CMT solutions have been produced for large (M_w > 6.0) events of 1976, using recalibrated data from the High Gain Long Period seismographic network (Ekström and Nettles, 1997).

Publications

• The CMT method is described in several key references.
• CMT solutions are presented in several papers, and for events in or after 1982, are reported quarterly or yearly in Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors.
• 1976 CMT solutions