The 2023 Turkey earthquake doublet: Earthquake relocation, seismic tomography, and stress field inversion

On February 6,2023,two earthquakes with magnitudes of M_(W) 7.8 and M_(W) 7.5 struck southeastern Turkey,causing significant casualties and economic losses.These seismic events occurred along the East Anatolian Fault Zone,a convergent boundary between the Arabian Plate and the Anatolian Subplate.In this study,we analyze the M_(W) 7.8 and M_(W) 7.5 earthquakes by comparing their aftershock relocations,tomographic images,and stress field inversions.The earthquakes were localized in the upper crust and exhibited steep dip angles.Furthermore,the aftershocks occurred either close to the boundaries of low and high P-wave velocity anomaly zones or within the low P-wave velocity anomaly zones.The East Anatolia Fault,associated with the M_(W) 7.8 earthquake,and the SürgüFault,related to the M_(W) 7.5 earthquake,predominantly experienced shear stress.However,their western sections experienced a combination of strike-slip and tensile stresses in addition to shear stress.The ruptures of the M_(W) 7.8 and M_(W) 7.5 earthquakes appear to have bridged a seismic gap that had seen sparse seismicity over the past 200 years prior to the 2023 Turkey earthquake sequence.

Coseismic deformation of the 2021 M_(W)7.4 Maduo earthquake from joint inversion of InSAR, GPS, and teleseismic data

The M_(W)7.4 Maduo earthquake occurred on 22 May 2021 at 02:04 CST with a large-expansion surface rupture.This earthquake was located in the Bayan Har block at the eastern Tibetan Plateau,where eight earthquakes of M_(S)>7.0 have occurred in the past 25 years.Here,we combined interferometric synthetic aperture radar,GPS,and teleseismic data to study the coseismic slip distribution,fault geometry,and dynamic source rupture process of the Maduo earthquake.We found that the overall coseismic deformation field of the Maduo earthquake is distributed in the NWW-SEE direction along 285°.There was slight bending at the western end and two branches at the eastern end.The maximum slip is located near the eastern bending area on the northern branch of the fault system.The rupture nucleated on the Jiangcuo fault and propagated approximately 160 km along-strike in both the NWW and SEE directions.The characteristic source rupture process of the Maduo earthquake is similar to that of the 2010 M_(W)6.8 Yushu earthquake,indicating that similar earthquakes with large-expansion surface ruptures and small shallow slip deficits can occur on both the internal fault and boundary fault of the Bayan Har block.