Impact of global seismicity on sea level change assessment

We analyze the effect of seismic activity on sea level variations by computing the time‐dependent vertical crustal movement and geoid change due to coseismic deformations and postseismic relaxation effects. Seismic activity can affect both the absolute sea level, changing the Earth's gravity field and hence the geoid height, and the relative sea level (RSL), i.e., the radial distance between seafloor and geoid level. By using comprehensive seismic catalogs we assess the net effect of seismicity on tidal relative sea level measurements as well as on the global oceanic surfaces, and we obtain an estimate of absolute sea level variations of seismic origin. We modified the approach adopted in our previous analysis, considering the issue of water volume conservation by applying the sealevel equation, and we improved our computational methods, enabling us to evaluate the effect of an extremely large number of earthquakes on large grids covering the whole oceanic surface. These new potentialities allow us to perform more detailed investigations and to discover a quantitative explanation for the overall tendency of earthquakes to produce a positive global relative sea level variation. Our results confirm the finding of a previous analysis that on a global scale most of the signal is associated with a few giant thrust events and that RSL estimates obtained using tide gauge data can be sensibly affected by the seismically driven sea level signal. The recent measures of sea level obtained by satellite altimetry show a wide regional variation of sea level trends over the oceanic surface, with the largest deviations from the mean trend occurring in tectonically active regions. While our estimates of average absolute sea level variations turn out to be orders of magnitude smaller than the satellite‐measured variations, we can still argue that the mass redistribution associated with aseismic tectonic processes may contribute to the observed regional variability of sea level variations. A detailed study of these tectonic contributions is important to acquire a complete understanding of the global sea level variations and will be the subject of future investigations.