Article A New Perspective on Fault Geometry and Slip Distribution of the 2009 Dachaidan Mw 6.3 Earthquake from InSAR Observations (original) (raw)
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Pure and Applied Geophysics, 2011
Coseismic deformation fields of the 6 October 2008 M w 6.3 Damxung earthquake were obtained from interferometric synthetic aperture radar by using three descending and two ascending Envisat images. Significant coseismic surface deformation occurred within 20 km 9 20 km of the epicenter with a maximum displacement of *0.3 m along the satellite line of sight. We model a linear elastic dislocation in a homogeneous half space and use a nonlinear constraint optimized algorithm to estimate the fault location, geometry and slip distribution. The results indicate a moment magnitude M w 6.3, and the earthquake is dominated by oblique normal and right-lateral slip with a maximum slip of 2.86 m at depth of 8 km. The rupture plane is about 15 km 9 14 km with strike S190°W and dip 55°to NW, located at a secondary fault of the Southeastern Piedmont of the Nyainqentanglha Mountains. Slip on normal faults in the Tibetan Plateau contributes to the rift evolution.
Fault Geometry and Slip Distribution of the 2010 Yushu Earthquakes Inferred from InSAR Measurement
Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 2011
We construct a coseismic deformation interferogram for the April 2010 Yushu earthquakes using ALOS/PALSAR data from the ascending track (path 487). We then infer the trace of the Yushu fault using the coherence image, and we build five fault models for the Yushu fault. To determine the fault geometry parameters that give the best fit to the coseismic interferogram, we apply an elastic dislocation algorithm. Our preferred fault model consists of two faults dipping to the northeast. One strikes ∼N60°W with a dip of 82°; the other strikes ∼N67°W with a dip of 86°. Lastly, we infer the coseismic slip distributions of the Yushu earthquakes by the inversion of the displacement in the line of sight (LOS). The results show that three high-slip concentrations are located at a depth of 5 ∼ 8 km, with a peak slip of 1.32 m at (96.93 E, 33.03 N). The Yushu fault is a left-lateral strike-slip faulting with small northside-up, dip-slip components.
Advances in Space Research, 2011
InSAR time series techniques can provide high-spatial resolution deformation fields across an active fault belt, even for zones with heavy vegetation coverage. An interseismic deformation map across the Garze–Yushu fault belt in the Tibetan Plateau, ∼300 km by ∼100 km, is derived from C-band Envisat/ASAR imagery collected between 2003 and 2010. Unlike previous research, we obtain a lookup figure which relates the slip rate with the fault locking depth, the dip angle and the rake angle. The estimated slip rate changes significantly with the locking depth and the rake angle, but relatively little with the dip angle. When considering the focal mechanism solutions of historical earthquake along the Garze–Yushu fault, the interseismic slip rate of the Garze–Yushu fault is close to a value of 6.4 mm/yr, which is between the highest (18.2 mm/yr) and the lowest (3.1 mm/yr) slip rate from GPS estimations, but slightly less than the minimum value (∼ 7 mm/yr) from the geological estimations. The earthquake recurrence interval on the Yushu part of Garze–Yushu fault equals 272 yr, and the April 14, 2010 Mw 6.9 earthquake has not completely released the accumulated strain energy between 1738 and 2010.
Extension on the Tibetan plateau: recent normal faulting measured by InSAR and body wave seismology
Geophysical …, 2010
We use InSAR and body wave modelling to determine the faulting parameters for a series of five Mw 5.9–7.1 normal faulting earthquakes that occurred during 2008, including the March 20 Yutian earthquake (Mw 7.1), one of the largest normal faulting events to have occurred recently on the continents. We also study three earlier normal faulting earthquakes that occurred in southern Tibet between 1992 and 2005. Coseismic deformation for each of these eight events is measured with ascending and descending interferograms from ENVISAT, ERS and ALOS SAR data. Elastic dislocation modelling of the line-of-sight InSAR displacements and body wave seismological modelling of P and SH waves are used to estimate fault parameters and are found to be in good agreement for all the events studied. The use of InSAR to measure deformation allows a relatively precise determination of the fault location in addition to resolving the focal plane ambiguity. Only five of the eight events are associated with a clear surface topographic feature, suggesting that an underestimation of the amount of extension would result from using the surface expressions of normal faulting alone. The observations, in all cases, are consistent with slip on planar surfaces, with dips in the range 40–50°, that penetrates the uppermost crust to a depth of 10–15 km. We find no evidence for active low-angle (dip less than 30°) normal faulting. The contribution of the normal faulting to overall extension estimated by summing seismic moments over earthquakes for the past 43 yr is 3–4 mm yr−1, or 15–20 per cent of the rates of extension measured across the plateau using GPS. 85 per cent of the moment release in normal faulting over the past 43 yr has occurred in regions whose surface height exceeds 5 km. This observation adds weight to the suggestions that the widespread normal faulting on the plateau is the result of variations in the gravitational potential energy of the lithosphere.
Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 2005
The M w 7.8 Kokoxili earthquake of 14 November 2001, which ruptured a 450-km-long stretch of the sinistral Kunlun strike-slip fault, at the northeastern edge of the Tibet plateau, China, ranks as the largest strike-slip event ever recorded instrumentally in Asia. Newly available high-resolution satellite HRS images (pixel size Յ1 m) acquired in the months following the earthquake proved a powerful tool to complement field investigations and to produce the most accurate map to date of the coseismic displacements along the central Kusai Hu segment of the rupture. The coseismic rupture geometry south and west of Buka Daban Feng, near the earthquake epicenter, was also investigated in detail. Along the Kusai Hu segment, slip partitioning is for the first time observed to occur simultaneously during a single event, with two parallel strands, ϳ2 km apart, localizing almost pure strike-slip and normal faulting. In all, 83 new HRS coseismic offset measurements, some of which calibrated by field work, show large, well-constrained variations (Ն100%) of the slip function over distances of only ϳ25 km. Tension cracks opening ahead of the shear dislocation and later offset by the upward propagating strike-slip rupture were observed, demonstrating that the rupture front propagated faster at depth than near the surface. The triple junction between the central Kusai Hu segment, the Kunlun Pass fault, where the rupture ended, and the Xidatan-Dongdatan segment, which could be the next segment to fail along the main Kunlun fault, acted as a strong barrier, implying that direct triggering of earthquake rupture on the Xidatan-Dongdatan segment by Kokoxili-type earthquakes may not be the rule.
Journal of Seismology, 2013
We invert InSAR from ascending and descending passes of ENVISAT/ASAR data to estimate the distribution of coseismic slip for the 2008 Mw 7.2 Yutian earthquake by separately using uniform finite element models (FEMs), non-uniform FEMs, and analytical elastic half-space (Okada) models. We use the Steepest Descent method and Laplacian smoothing to regularize and estimate the slip distribution for each of these different models. Fault surface ruptures interpolated from Quickbird optical images constrain the strike of the fault. The uniform FEM and Okada models assume a fault embedded in a homogeneous and elastic finite domain or half-space, respectively, while the non-uniform FEM describes a domain with spatially variable elastic properties according to the geological structure of Tibet plateau and Tarim. We find that the estimated slip distribution of the non-uniform FEM is similar to that of the uniform FEM but has a slightly larger moment (~2 %). However, more noticeable discrepancies occur between the slip distributions of the uniform FEM and Okada model, where the slip pattern estimated with the FEM looks more scattered and locates at a lower depth. We conclude that, for the case of the Yutian earthquake, the improvement brought by simulating the distribution of geologic material properties is insignificant. This suggests that the uniform geologic structure of Okada models may be sufficient for simulating large intra-continental earthquakes.
Journal of Asian Earth Sciences, 2017
The 2015 M w 7:8 Nepal earthquake occurred on the segment of the main Himalayan thrust fault between the Indian and Eurasian plates, and caused serious casualties. This earthquake may produce a profound impact on the evolution of the Tibetan Plateau and have brought a stress loading to faults within the plateau. In this paper, a high-resolution slip distribution of the 2015 Nepal earthquake is inverted from the InSAR and GPS data in the near field, and is used to compute the evolution of the cumulative Coulomb stress changes on faults in the earthquake-prone zone in the Tibetan Plateau. In the given reasonable parameters, the calculated co-and post-seismic stress changes on faults do not exceed 1.0 kPa at the north of latitude 32°in the Tibetan Plateau. The largest positive stress changes occur on the South Tibet Detachment fault, and the magnitudes are much less than 100 kPa. The estimated seismicity rate change on the segment of the South Tibet Detachment fault can be up to a level of two hundred thousandths. This indicates that there is a high hazard of earthquake triggering in the South Tibet Detachment fault and its adjacent regions. In the northern and eastern Tibetan Plateau, the estimated seismicity rate changes are lower than a level of one thousandth. However, some faults with a relative high background seismicity rate, such as the Xianshuihe and Longmenshan faults, may have a high hazard of earthquake triggering in the future.
Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 2016
We derive a coseismic slip model of the 2015 M w 7.8 Gorkha earthquake on the basis of GPS and line-of-sight displacements from ALOS-2 descending interferograms, using Green's functions calculated with a 3-D finite element model (FEM). The FEM simulates a nonuniform distribution of elastic material properties and a precise geometric configuration of the irregular topographical surface. The rupturing fault is modeled as a low-angle and north dipping surface within the Main Frontal Thrust along the convergent margin of the Himalayas. The optimal model that inherits heterogeneous material properties provides a significantly better solution than that in a homogenous domain at the 95% confidence interval. The best fit solution for the domain having a nonuniform distribution of material properties reveals a rhombus-shaped slip zone of three composite asperities. Slip is primarily concentrated at a depth of 15 km with both dip-slip (maximum 6.54 m) and strike-slip (maximum 2.0 m) components, giving rise to a geodetic-based moment of 1.09 × 10 21 Nm in general agreement with the seismological estimate. The optimal relative weights among GPS and interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) are deduced from a new method, MC-HVCE which combines a Monte Carlo search and a Helmert Method of Variance Components Estimation. This method determines the relative weights in a systemic approach which preserves the intrinsic solution smoothness. The joint solution is significantly better than those inverted from each individual data set. This methodology allows us to integrate multiple data sets of geodetic observations with seismic tomography, in an effort to achieve a better understanding of seismic ruptures within crustal heterogeneity.
We used two tracks of ALOS PALSAR images to investigate the focal mechanism and slip distribution of the 2011 March 24, M W 6.8 Burma strike-slip earthquake. Three different SAR techniques, namely conventional interferometry, SAR pixel offsets (SPO) and multipleaperture InSAR (MAI), were employed to obtain the coseismic surface deformation fields along the ∼30 km length of the fault rupture. Along-track measurements from SPO and MAI techniques show a high correlation, and were subsequently used to precisely determine the location and extent of the surface fault trace. The best-fitting fault model geometry derived from an iterative inversion technique suggests that the rupture occurred on a near-vertical sinistral strike-slip fault west of the Nam Ma fault with a strike of 70 • . A maximum slip of 4.2 m occurs at a depth of 2.5 km, with significant slip constrained only to the upper 10 km of the crust.