Groundwater radon anomalies associated with earthquakes

Earthquake-related changes in groundwater radon have been detected at a sensitive observation site located right on a major active fault in Northeast Japan. A time-series analysis based on Bayesian statistics was successfully applied to remove background variations from the observed radon data, enabling us to examine the earthquake-related changes in detail.

We set a simple criterion of amplitude and duration for an anomaly observed in our radon data; we define an anomaly as a radon change that kept its level beyond 2σ (a standard deviation over the whole observation period) during a period longer than one day. We have observed 20 radon anomalies that satisfied this criterion from January 1984 to December 1988. Most of these anomalies have turned out to be related to large earthquakes that occurred in East Japan and its surrounding area; we have identified 12 post-seismic and 2-pre-seismic radon anomalies out of a total of 30 earthquakes with magnitude M 6.0 and hypocentral distance D 1000 km.

The typical pattern of the post-seismic anomalies is a radon decrease which started just after an earthquake, lasting for periods ranging from a few days to more than one week. The amplitude of the post-seismic anomalies depends on both magnitude and hypocentral distance, and can, in general, be expressed by a simple magnitude-distance relationships.

A possible pre-seismic anomaly was observed about one week before the largest earthquake that occurred in this region during the observation period (March 6, 1984; M = 7.9, D = 1000 km). Another possible pre-seismic anomaly was observed about three days before two nearby large earthquakes that occurred at almost the same place in a time interval of 53 min (February 6, 1987; M = 6.4 and M = 6.7, D = 130 km).