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Body Waves– and Surface Waves–Derived Moment Tensor Catalog for Garhwal-Kumaon Himalayas

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Recent Developments in Earthquake Seismology

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Abstract

Moment tensor associated with an earthquake is the mathematical representation of the movement along a fault. It comprises nine generalized vector couples (six independent) that describe the material strength at the source, alignment of the fault and the amount of slip. This study presents a moment tensor collection of 16 earthquakes that occurred in Uttarakhand, India between 2010 and 2021. We perform inversion tests by using both body and surface waves. Our goal is to find the minimum misfit solution by performing a grid search over source depths, magnitude, and orientation of fault. A series of inversion tests were performed for each event using varying bandpass for surface and body waves and removing bad stations to obtain the best possible solutions. The results, thus, obtained provide insight into the complex tectonics processes at work.

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Acknowledgement

We thank IIT Roorkee for provinding financial support and infrastructure for carrying out this work. The waveform data used in this study is obtained from the broadband seismometer network deployed in Garhwal Himalaya by the Earthquake Engineering Department, IIT Roorkee, and funded by Tehri Hydro Development Corporation India Ltd. (THDCIL). We thank Prof. S. C. Gupta and Dr. Arup Sen, for operations and management of seismic netrwork, and discussion regarding the metadata of locally saved data. We thank Navneet Srivastava for technical support. All the maps are drawn by the python version of Generic Mapping Tool (PyGMT) (Wessel et al., 2013), and inversion has been done by MTUQ (https://github.com/uafgeotools/mtuq), which uses Obspy (a Python) framework for processing seismological data (Beyreuther et al., 2010; Megies et al., 2011; Krischer et al., 2015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India

    Rinku Mahanta & Vipul Silwal

  2. Department of Earthquake Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India

    M. L. Sharma

Authors
  1. Rinku Mahanta
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  2. Vipul Silwal
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  3. M. L. Sharma
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Correspondence to Vipul Silwal .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India

    Rohtash Kumar

  2. Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India

    Raghav Singh

  3. Veer Bahadur Singh Purvanchal University, Jaunpur, India

    Shyam Kanhaiya

  4. Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India

    Satya Prakash Maurya

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Mahanta, R., Silwal, V., Sharma, M.L. (2024). Body Waves– and Surface Waves–Derived Moment Tensor Catalog for Garhwal-Kumaon Himalayas. In: Kumar, R., Singh, R., Kanhaiya, S., Maurya, S.P. (eds) Recent Developments in Earthquake Seismology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47538-2_4

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