Abstract
Coulomb stress accumulation and releasing history and its relationship with the occurrence of strong historical earthquakes could deepen our understanding of the occurrence pattern of strong earthquakes and hence its seismic potential in future. The sinistral strike-slip Xianshuihe- Xiaojiang fault zone (XXFS) is one of the most dangerous fault zones in China, extending 1 500-km-long from the central Tibetan Plateau to the Red River fault zone. There are 35 M≥6.5 historical earthquakes occurred since 1327, hence it is an ideal site for studying the Coulomb stress evolution history and its relationship with the occurrences of strong earthquakes. In this study, we evaluated the Coulomb stress change history along the XXFS by synthesizing fault geometry, GPS data and historical earthquakes. Coulomb stress change history also revealed different patterns of historical earthquakes on different segments of the XXFS, such as characteristic recurrence intervals along the Salaha-Moxi fault and super-cycles along the Xianshuihe fault. Based on the occurrence pattern of past historical earthquakes and current Coulomb stress field obtained in this study, we suggest positive ΔCFS and hence high seismic potential along the Salaha-Moxi fault and the Anninghe fault.
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We are grateful to Prof. Dong Jia, Drs. Gang Rao and Maomao Wang for discussions. This work was supported by the Science Project awarded to A. Lin from the Ministry of Education of China (No. 23253002), the Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan, and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2016M591817) to Bing Yan. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s12583-018-0840-2.
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Yan, B., Toda, S. & Lin, A. Coulomb Stress Evolution History as Implication on the Pattern of Strong Earthquakes along the Xianshuihe-Xiaojiang Fault System, China. J. Earth Sci. 29, 427–440 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12583-018-0840-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12583-018-0840-2