Georgia, Khutia: 1963-2022

The Khutia cluster is named for a village in Abkhazia, a break-away province in western Georgia in the western Caucasus Mountains. Most of the cluster is in Abkhazia, but one dense subcluster of events is off-shore in the Black Sea. The cluster contains a 6.5 Ms event on July 16, 1963 and five earthquakes of magnitude 5.0-5.6 so there is a good sample of teleseismic data. Station distribution for direct calibration is not ideal and a robust result is only obtained by including a fairly large geographic region, using many observations around 1° epicentral distance, and including many earthquakes that are mainly observed at regional distances. All events have depth control, mainly from near-source and local distance phase data. Depths [...]