Christian Sippl

Seismotectonics of the Pamir

Based on a 2 year seismic record from a local network, we characterize the deformation of the seismogenic crust of the Pamir in the northwestern part of the India-Asia collision zone. We located more than 6000 upper crustal earthquakes in a regional 3-D velocity model. For 132 of these events, we determined source mechanisms, mostly through full waveform moment tensor inversion of locally and regionally recorded seismograms. We also produced a new and comprehensive neotectonic map of the Pamir, which we relate to the seismic deformation. Along Pamir’s northern margin, where GPS measurements show significant shortening, we find thrust and dextral strike-slip faulting along west to northwest trending planes, indicating slip partitioning between northward thrusting and westward extrusion. An active, north-northeast trending, sinistral transtensional fault system dissects the Pamir’s interior, connecting the lakes Karakul and Sarez, and extends by distributed faulting into the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan. East of this lineament, the Pamir moves northward en bloc, showing little seismicity and internal deformation. The western Pamir exhibits a higher amount of seismic deformation; sinistral strike-slip faulting on northeast trending or conjugate planes and normal faulting indicate east-west extension and north-south shortening. We explain this deformation pattern by the gravitational collapse of the western Pamir Plateau margin and the lateral extrusion of Pamir rocks into the Tajik-Afghan depression, where it causes thin-skinned shortening of basin sediments above an evaporitic décollement. Superposition of Pamir’s bulk northward movement and collapse and westward extrusion of its western flank causes the gradual change of surface velocity orientations from north-northwest to due west observed by GPS geodesy. The distributed shear deformation of the western Pamir and the activation of the Sarez-Karakul fault system may ultimately be caused by the northeastward propagation of India’s western transform margin into Asia, thereby linking deformation in the Pamir all the way to the Chaman fault in the south in Afghanistan.

The 2008 Nura earthquake sequence at the Pamir‐Tian Shan collision zone, southern Kyrgyzstan

This research was funded by DFG bundle TIPAGE (PAK 443), the CAME project bundle TIPTIMON funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (support code 03G0809), and GFZ. We acknowledge funding for the Earthquake Task Force deployment by GFZ and the Hannover Ruck reinsurance company.

Seismotectonic study of the Fergana region (Southern Kyrgyzstan): distribution and kinematics of local seismicity

We present new seismicity and focal-mechanism data for the Fergana basin and surrounding mountain belts in western Kyrgyzstan from a temporary local seismic network. A total of 210 crustal earthquakes with hypocentral depths shallower than 25 km were observed during a 12-month period in 2009/2010. The hypocenter distribution indicates a complex net of seismically active structures. The seismicity derived in this study is mainly concentrated at the edges of the Fergana basin, whereas the observed rate of seismicity within the basin is low. The seismicity at the dominant tectonic feature of the region, the Talas-Fergana fault, is likewise low, so the fault seems to be inactive or locked. To estimate the uncertainties of earthquake locations derived in this study, a strong explosion with known origin time and location is used as a ground truth calibration event which suggests a horizontal and vertical accuracy of about 1 km for our relocations. We derived 35 focal mechanisms using first motion polarities and retrieved a set of nine moment tensor solutions for earthquakes with moment magnitude (Mw) ranging from 3.3 to 4.9 by waveform inversion. The solutions reveal both thrust and strike-slip mechanisms compatible with a NW-SE direction of compression for the Fergana region. Two previously unknown tectonic structures in the Fergana region could be identified, both featuring strike-slip kinematics. The combined analysis of the results derived in this study allowed a detailed insight into the currently active tectonic structures and their kinematics where little information had previously been available.

New constraints on the current stress field and seismic velocity structure of the eastern Yilgarn Craton from mechanisms of local earthquakes

The Yilgarn Craton has hosted some of the largest earthquakes within the Australian continent in the last 100 years. Earthquakes have mainly been studied in the western part of the craton, and are thought to result from the reactivation of Precambrian structures in an E–W compressive regional stress field imposed by plate-scale processes. Here we present moment tensor solutions for three recent moderate-sized earthquakes around the town of Kalgoorlie that are inconsistent with E–W compression, but instead suggest E–W extension in the eastern Yilgarn Craton. Waveforms of earthquakes at Boulder (MW = 4.0, 20 April 2010), Kalgoorlie (MW = 4.3, 26 February 2014) and Coolgardie (MW = 3.9, 31 October 2014) were inverted for moment tensors. All three earthquakes were shallow (centroid depth ≤4 km) normal-faulting events that occurred along roughly N–S-striking planes, either with a steep westward or a relatively shallow eastward dip. The robustness of the retrieved mechanisms has been thoroughly tested, employing different earth models, assuming different locations for the earthquakes and using different period bands for the inversion. The fit of synthetic long-period waveforms to the observations was in all cases substantially improved by assuming a two-layered crust with high S wavespeeds (about 3.9–4 km/s) overlying substantially slower material. Since there is independent evidence from active source profiles for a P velocity increase between the upper and lower crust, a large difference in vp/vs ratio between upper and lower crust is the only way to explain both lines of evidence. This vertical contrast could represent a dominance of felsic material in the upper crust, and substantially more mafic material in the lower crust. Taken together, our results also appear to imply that the regional stress field is E–W extensive in the Kalgoorlie area, and possibly for the entire Kalgoorlie Terrane. This is contrary to current assumptions from continent-scale stress modelling. That the orientations of rupture planes roughly align with the regional structural grain could indicate that Archean structures are reactivated in response to the current stress field.

Characterizing Afterslip and Ground Displacement Rate Increase Following the 2014 Iquique‐Pisagua Mw 8.1 Earthquake, Northern Chile

Proyecto Fondecyt, CONICYT, CHILE 11140904 German Science Foundation (DFG) 2310/3-1

Crustal surface wave velocity structure of the east Albany-Fraser Orogen, Western Australia, from ambient noise recordings

S U M M A R Y Group and phase velocity maps in the period range 2–20 s for the Proterozoic east AlbanyFraser Orogen, Western Australia, are extracted from ambient seismic noise recorded with the 70-station ALFREX array. This 2 yr temporary installation provided detailed coverage across the orogen and the edge of the Neoarchean Yilgarn Craton, a region where no passive seismic studies of this scale have occurred to date. The surface wave velocities are rather high overall (>3 km s−1 nearly everywhere), as expected for exposed Proterozoic basement rocks. No clear signature of the transition between Yilgarn Craton and Albany-Fraser Orogen is observed, but several strong anomalies corresponding to more local geological features were obtained. A prominent, NE-elongated high-velocity anomaly in the northern part of the array is coincident with a Bouguer gravity high caused by the upper crustal metamorphic rocks of the Fraser Zone. This feature disappears towards longer periods, which hints at an exclusively upper crustal origin for this anomaly. Further east, the limestones of the Cenozoic Eucla Basin are clearly imaged as a pronounced low-velocity zone at short periods, but the prevalence of low velocities to periods of ≥5 s implies that the uppermost basement in this area is likewise slow. At longer periods, slightly above-average surface wave velocities are imaged below the Eucla Basin.

A Cross-Correlation-Based Approach to Direct Seismogram Stacking for Receiver-Side Structural Inversion

Abstract Direct stacks of teleseismic waveforms recorded at a station have been used as an alternative to receiver functions for the retrieval of crustal 1D S ‐wave velocity models through inversion. Although they generally feature lower signal‐to‐noise ratios, their use has recently gained some attention because they do not rely on deconvolution. Avoiding deconvolution in waveform processing is a significant advantage for probabilistic (Bayesian) inversion methods that rely on a realistic assumption about the statistical distribution of waveform noise. However, the preservation of the effective source time function (STF) in the waveform data poses new challenges in the data processing. In this short note, we show that the simple technique that has been applied to directly stack waveforms to date lacks precision, because waveforms with emergent onsets or more complicated STFs are often stacked out of phase, which leads to artifacts in the stacked trace. We introduce a new cross‐correlation‐based stacking technique that avoids phase errors by stacking groups of mutually coherent traces and creating stacks for each of these families of traces. This separates the dataset into groups of events with similar STFs, which can be inverted jointly or separately. Electronic Supplement: Figure of stacks for four additional global stations.