Seismicity patterns in southwestern France

Abstract

Seismic monitoring of southwestern France began in the 1960s, and homogeneous coverage by observation networks has been in place since the 1990s. The accumulation of data now allows a refined understanding of regional seismicity, not only on its spatial aspects, but also on the regularity of the earthquake distribution over time. This paper is both a review of the work carried out on the subject, and a progress report on the current knowledge of the regional seismicity in its seismotectonic context. With the support of maps, the available catalogs are exploited at different nested scales, from the region as a whole to the numerous clusters that characterize the seismicity of southwestern France, and more specifically that of the Pyrenees. An exhaustive study of these Pyrenean clusters and their temporal behavior is proposed, allowing in particular a better description of the prominent seismicity stripe to the northwest of the range.

Keywords

• Southwestern France
• Pyrenees
• Seismicity
• Catalog
• Cluster
• Time behavior