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InSAR Coseismic Deformation, Fault Slip Inversion and Coulomb Stress Evolution of the Qinghai Menyuan Earthquake on January 8, 2022, China

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Abstract

On January 8, 2022, an M6.9 earthquake occurred in Menyuan, Qinghai, which caused surface damage. In this paper, the line-of-sight (LOS) coseismic surface deformation field is obtained by the interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) of the Sentinel-1 satellite. Constrained by the InSAR surface deformation field, a Bayesian method based on sequential Monte Carlo sampling was used to invert the geometric parameters of seismogenic faults and the distribution of fault slip. Moment magnitude of the model is Mw6.6. The earthquake was determined to occur at a left-lateral strike-slip fault. Based on the historical strong earthquake dislocation model, the PSGRN/PSCMP program was used to calculate the Coulomb stress change at the epicenter of the 2022 Menyuan M6.9 earthquake caused by the surrounding historical strong earthquakes. The results show that the occurrence of the Gulang M8 earthquake in 1927, the Menyuan Mw5.7 in 1986 and the Menyuan Mw5.9 earthquake in 2016 caused a significant increase in Coulomb stress at the epicenter of the 2022 Menyuan earthquake. The coseismic and post-seismic Coulomb stress increases were greater than 0.01 MPa. Combined analysis of this result with regional tectonic stress, allows us to conclude that the 2022 Menyuan M6.9 earthquake occurred on the dynamic background of the continuous extrusion of the Indian plate towards the Eurasian plate, and the regional historical strong earthquake activity played a significant role in promoting it. The research results provide a theoretical basis for understanding the seismogenic background and dynamic mechanism of the 2022 Menyuan earthquake.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ESA provides Sentinel-1A radar data for this study (https://search.asf.alaska.edu/), the graphic files used in this paper are drawn by GMT (Wessel and Smith, 1998). We used ENVI (https://www.geoscene.cn/) for SAR data processing and; and PSGRN/PSCMP (Wang et al., 2006) for the Coulomb stress calculation. Thank you all here.

Funding

This study was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 51908517).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Seismology, CEA, 430071, Wuhan, China

    Gang Yang, Song Yu, Dongning Lei, Jianchao Wu & Yongjian Cai

  2. Hubei Key Laboratory of Earthquake Early Warning, 430071, Wuhan, China

    Gang Yang, Song Yu, Dongning Lei, Jianchao Wu & Yongjian Cai

  3. Hubei Earthquake Administration, 430071, Wuhan, China

    Gang Yang

  4. Wuhan Institute of Earthquake Engineering Co., Ltd., 430071, Wuhan, China

    Gang Yang

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  1. Gang Yang
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Contributions

The authors confirm contribution to the paper as follows: study conception and design: Gang Yang; data collection: Song Yu, Dongning Lei; analysis and interpretation of results: Jianchao Wu,·Yongjian Cai; draft manuscript preparation: Gang Yang. All authors reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Gang Yang.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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The European Space Agency owns the copyright of Sentinel-1 SAR data, and the Alaska Satellite Facility provides the downloading service through the https://search.asf.alaska.edu/.

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Abbreviations: LOS: line-of-sight; InSAR: interferometric synthetic aperture radar; GPS: Global Positioning System.

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Yang, G., Yu, S., Lei, D. et al. InSAR Coseismic Deformation, Fault Slip Inversion and Coulomb Stress Evolution of the Qinghai Menyuan Earthquake on January 8, 2022, China. Izv., Phys. Solid Earth 59, 1113–1124 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1069351323060241

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