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Rupture directivity of the August 3rd, 2014 Ludian earthquake (Yunan, China)

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Abstract

An M6.5 earthquake occurred on August 3rd, 2014 in Ludian of Yunnan Province in China, causing severe casualty and economic loss. Local broadband waveform inversion with the CAP method demonstrates that the earthquake is a strike-slip event, with the strike along 70° and 160° for the two nodal planes respectively. However, the geological structure in the epicentral region is complicated with abundant active faults, and it is challenging to identify the seismogenic fault with the focal plane solutions due to nodal-plane ambiguity. We resolved the rupture directivity by measuring the difference between centroid location and hypocenter of the Ludian earthquake with the time shift from CAP inversion, and found that the nodal plane with the strike of 160° is the ruptured fault plane. Moreover, the rupture is found to propagate from northwest to southeast.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mengcheng National Geophysical Observatory, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    XiaoHui He

  2. State Key Laboratory of Geodesy and Earth’s Dynamics, Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics, Wuhan, 430077, China

    SiDao Ni

  3. China Earthquake Networks Center, Beijing, 100045, China

    Jie Liu

Authors
  1. XiaoHui He
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  2. SiDao Ni
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  3. Jie Liu
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Correspondence to SiDao Ni.

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He, X., Ni, S. & Liu, J. Rupture directivity of the August 3rd, 2014 Ludian earthquake (Yunan, China). Sci. China Earth Sci. 58, 795–804 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-015-5053-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-015-5053-2

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