1 Seismic velocity reduction and accelerated recovery due to earthquakes on the Longmenshan fault 2 Shunping Pei1,2, Fenglin Niu3,4, Yehuda Ben-Zion5, Quan Sun2, Yanbing Liu2, Xiaotian Xue2, Jinrong Su6, 3 Zhigang Shao7 4 1CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), 5 Beijing 100101, China 6 2 CAS Key Laboratory of Continental Collision and Plateau Uplift, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, 7 Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS), Beijing 100101, China 8 3State Key Laboratory of petroleum Resource and Prospecting, and Unconventional Gas Institute, China 9 University of Petroleum at Beijing, Beijing 102249, China 10 4Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, 11 Houston, TX 77005, USA 12 5Department of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA 13 6Earthquake Administration of Sichuan Province, Chengdu 610041, China 14 7Institute of Earthquake Science, China Earthquake Administration, Beijing 100029, China 15 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to F.N. (
[email protected]). 16 17 Various studies report on temporal changes of seismic velocities in the crust and attempt to relate 18 the observations to changes of stress and material properties around faults. While there is growing 19 number of observations on co-seismic velocity reductions, detailed observations of healing phases 20 are generally lacking. Here we report on pronounced co-seismic reduction of velocities around two 21 locked sections (asperities) of the Longmenshan fault with large slip during the 2008 Mw 7.9 22 Wenchuan earthquake, and subsequent healing of the velocities. The healing phase is accelerated 23 significantly at the southern asperity right after the nearby 2013 Mw 6.6 Lushan earthquake.