Problems of Engineering Seismology: article

Аnnotation: The results obtained earlier on the location of the core’s earthquake foci in the Caucasus clearly show that the methods used in the practice of the seismic service to determine the hypocenters of earthquakes do not allow us to accurately locate events and unlikely may be the basis for forecasting earthquakes and detailed study of the structure of the earth’s crust and upper mantle. In addition, the arrival times of seismic waves often have large errors that do not allow for qualitative processing of observations and, therefore, to obtain reliable results. And further, the attracting only one velocity curve or one set of travel-time curves for determining hypocenters of earthquakes for all stations of the network also does not contribute to an accurate determination of the position of hypocenters of earthquakes. In order to locate of the earthquake foci with high precision, necessary also have sufficiently detailed representation about the structure of the Earth in the crust and upper mantle in the studied region. At the same time, it is desirable to take information about the structure of the region not from data about earthquake but from other observations, for example, according to deep seismic sounding (DSS) data. On the basis of seismological bulletins for 1970-2015 we have refined the coordinates of the Caucasus crust earthquake hypocenters. The obtained new distribution of the Caucasus core earthquake hypocenters is significantly different from the old hypocenter distribution obtained from the catalog.