The South Caspian Basin (SCB) is an aseismic block that moves independently to its surroundings. Together with the Arabia-Eurasia collision, it controls the active tectonics of Turkmenistan. The directions, rates, and rotation poles of the SCB relative to Iran and Eurasia are not well resolved. In a new paper recently published in TECTONICS, we constrain the motion of the SCB by measuring the slip rate of the Main Kopeh Dagh Fault (MKDF) in Turkmenistan. Here’s what we found:
more
In a recently published open access paper in TECTONICS, Zebari et al. report for the first time fault slip rates from Iraqi Kurdistan in the NW Zagros Fold-Thrust Belt. This area is challenging when it comes to narrowing down the distribution of S-N shortening and the associated fault slip rates, because in general, faults don’t reach the surface there. For this reason, we used a proxy: we dated uplifted river terraces with stimulated luminescence and used kinematic modelling of the Zagros fold belt. With this approach we can show that slip rate of the Mountain Front Fault is about 1.5 mm/a. Detachment folds take up another ~1.6 mm/a.
more
The Tien Shan takes up about 20 mm/yr of N-S shortening as a result of the India-Eurasia convergence. Recent paleoseismological studies have shown that the shortening is accommodated by a large number of faults, whose slip rates are relatively low. Although the historical earthquake catalogues only reach back a few hundred years, we know that the Tien Shan has seen some of the strongest intracontinetal quakes world-wide with magnitudes exceeding M8. Paleoseismological studies have revealed a large number of surface-rupturing earthquakes, too. But the question is: Do all these known faults rupture in strong earthquakes? In a recent paper, my colleagues and I argue that there is at least one major fault in the Northern Tien Shan that is creeping (Mackenzie et al., 2018). more
Richard Styron has published several interesting tools for fault/stress analysis and other geoscience problems, see his website here: http://rocksandwater.net/. The latest Python tool he is sharing with us is for calculating fault slip rates from offset topography data – great stuff for paleoseismologists! He announced this a few days ago and allowed me to spread the news. Check it out and let him know what you think!
Hi all,
Last year I built a tool to calculate fault slip rates from offset marker data (age and offset distance of features cut by faults). Although I will be publishing a paper using it eventually, I’d like to spread the word about it now and just get it out to the community. The Slip Rate Calculator can be found here: https://github.com/cossatot/slip_rate_calculator, with more documentation.
more
Vanja Kastelic and Michele M. C. Carafa (INGV, L’Aquila, Italy) recently published an article in the Bollettino di Geofisica Teorica e Applicata (an international journal of Earth sciences) entitled “Earthquake rates inferred from active faults and geodynamics: the case of the External Dinarides.” This article covers the area affected by the earthquake of Ml 4.7 (Mw 4.6) occurred on April 22, 2014.
The same authors also wrote a brief seismotectonic report dealing with such an earthquake. They share the report with us under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
A quick seismotectonic report for the 22 April 2014 (Mw=4.6) earthquake in SW Slovenia
Vanja Kastelic1 and Michele M. C. Carafa1
more
Several paleoseismology papers have been published in the latest issue of BSSA (103-1). There’s interesting new data on faults in New Zealand, California, and several regions in China, Taiwan and India. For sure I will read the following papers: more
