Highland Boundary Fault Zone: Tectonic implications of the Aberfoyle earthquake sequence of 2003

The Highland Boundary Fault Zone (HBFZ) is one of the major faulted tectonic boundaries in Great Britain. Historically, seismicity has occurred in this zone around the town of Comrie. But an earthquake sequence that occurred in 2003 near the village of Aberfoyle (ML 1.3–3.2) was the first significant activity to be recorded in the HBFZ since the installation of modern seismograph networks in the 1970s. This study describes detailed analysis of these data. The waveform signals of the events were almost identical and by applying a cross-correlation technique combined with multiple event location, the alignment of the events was found to be WSW–ENE. This alignment matches one of the nodal planes determined by joint focal mechanism analysis. The fault plane dips to the northwest, and shows oblique sinistral strike–slip with normal movement. The orientation of the event alignment matches the direction and orientation of observed features in the HBFZ. Hence, it is concluded that the WSW–ENE striking nodal plane was the causative fault that is associated with the HBFZ. The orientation of maximum compressional stress is rotated from the regional average expected due to the Mid-Atlantic ridge-push force. This rotation is possibly explained by stresses due to postglacial rebound. Smaller events in the sequence were used as empirical Green's functions and deconvolved from the larger events to determine source time functions. The corresponding corner frequencies matched results from spectral fitting, showing that the events were of relatively low stress drop.