Eric Jacques

SEISMIC HAZARD IN THE MARMARA SEA REGION FOLLOWING THE 17 AUGUST 1999 IZMIT EARTHQUAKE

On 17 August 1999, a destructive magnitude 7.4 earthquake occurred 100 km east of Istanbul, near the city of Izmit, on the North Anatolian fault. This 1,600-km-long plate boundary slips at an average rate of 2–3 cm yr-1 (refs 3,4,5), and historically has been the site of many devastating earthquakes. This century alone it has ruptured over 900 km of its length. Models of earthquake-induced stress change combined with active fault maps had been used to forecast that the epicentral area of the 1999 Izmit event was indeed a likely location for the occurrence of a large earthquake. Here we show that the 1999 event itself significantly modifies the stress distribution resulting from previous fault interactions. Our new stress models take into account all events in the region with magnitudes greater than 6 having occurred since 1700 (ref. 7) as well as secular interseismic stress change, constrained by GPS data. These models provide a consistent picture of the long term spatio–temporal behaviour of the North Anatolian fault and indicate that two events of magnitude equal to, or greater than, the Izmit earthquake are likely to occur within the next decades beneath the Marmara Sea, south of Istanbul.

Propagation of rifting along the Arabia-Somalia Plate Boundary: Into Afar

It is generally accepted that the Aden ridge has propagated westward from ∼58°E to the western tip of the Gulf of Aden/Tadjoura, at the edge of Afar. Here, we use new tectonic and geochronological data to examine the geometry and kinematics of deformation related to the penetration of that ridge on dry land in the Republic of Djibouti. We show that it veers northward, forming a narrow zone of dense faulting along the northeastern edge of the Afar depression. The zone includes two volcanic rifts (Asal-Ghoubbet and Manda Inakir), connected to one another and to the submarine part of the ridge by transfer zones. Both rifts are composite, divided into two or three disconnected, parallel, NW-SE striking subrifts, all of which appear to have propagated northwestward. In Asal-Ghoubbet as in Manda Inakir, the subrifts appear to have formed in succession, through north directed jumps from subrifts more farther south. At present, the northernmost subrifts (Manda and Dirko Koma) of the Manda Inakir rift, form the current tip of the northward propagating Arabia-Somalia plate boundary in Afar. We account for most observations by a mechanical model similar to that previously inferred for the Gulf of Aden, in which propagation is governed by the intensity and direction of the minimum horizontal principal stress, σ3. We interpret the northward propagation on land, almost orthogonal to that in the gulf, to be related to necking of the Central Afar lithosphere where it is thinnest. Such necking may be a consequence of differential magmatic thickening, greater in the center of the Afar depression where the Ethiopian hot spot enhanced profuse basaltic effusion and underplating than along the edges of the depression. The model explains why the Aden ridge foregoes its WSW propagation direction, constant from ∼58°E to Asal-Ghoubbet. At a smaller scale, individual rifts and subrifts keep opening perpendicular to the Arabia-Somalia (or Danakil-Somalia) motion vector and propagate northwestward. Concurrently, such lithospheric cracks are forced to jump northward, such that the plate boundary remains inside the regional N-S necking zone. Changes of obliquity between the directions of overall and local propagation may account for different segmentation patterns, a small angle promoting long, en echelon subrifts, and a high-angle, smaller, nested, “subrifts within subrifts.” The propagation mechanism is thus similar, whether in oceanic or continental lithosphere, the principal change being the overall propagation path, here governed by thickness changes rather than by the geometry in map view as previously inferred for the rest of the Aden ridge. Finally, because the same mechanism has led rifting along the Red Sea to propagate southward and jump to the western edge of Afar, the Arabia-Somalia and Arabia-Nubia plate boundaries tips have missed each other and keep overlapping further, leading to strain transfer by large-scale bookshelf faulting.

Arc parallel extension and localization of volcanic complexes in Guadeloupe, Lesser Antilles

[1]xa0Subduction of Atlantic seafloor under the Caribbean plate causes shallow earthquakes within the Lesser Antilles volcanic arc. Such earthquakes, above the subduction interface, show strike-slip or normal fault plane solutions, the latter with ∼E-W striking nodal planes. To better assess seismic hazard and the coupling between volcanism and tectonics, we investigated faulting related to overriding-plate deformation in the Guadeloupe archipelago. Using aerial photographs, satellite SPOT images, and topographic maps (1/25000 scale), we mapped active and middle to late Pleistocene fissures and normal fault systems that cut the uplifted coral platforms Grande-Terre and Marie-Galante and the volcanic rocks of Basse-Terre. The available marine geophysical data show that the faults extend offshore to bound submarine rifts. The E-W striking, 1500 m deep, V-shaped Marie-Galante rift separates the two islands of Marie-Galante and Grande-Terre. Normal faults in the north of Grande-Terre appear to mark the similarly V-shaped, western termination of the 5000 m deep, N°50E to N130°E striking Desirade graben. Three shallow, M ∼ 5.5 earthquakes (6 May 1851, 29 April 1897, 3 August 1992) appear to have ruptured segments of the Marie-Galante rift boundary faults. The young “La Grande Decouverte” volcanic complex of Basse-Terre, including the 1440 A.D. Soufriere dome, lies within the western termination of the Marie-Galante rift. The ancient volcanic shoulders of the rift buttress the active dome to the north and south, which may explain why major prehistoric sector collapses and pyroclastic avalanches have been directed southwestward into the Caribbean Sea, or southeastward into the Atlantic Ocean. The Marie-Galante rift is typical of other troughs transverse to the northeastern edge of the Caribbean plate. We interpret such troughs, which are roughly orthogonal to the arc, to result from slip-partitioning and extension perpendicular to plate convergence. That they disappear southward implies that they result from interaction between the Caribbean and North American plates.

Strain transfer between disconnected, propagating rifts in Afar

We showed before that both the Aden and Red Sea plate boundaries are currently rifting and propagating along two distinct paths into Afar through the opening of a series of disconnected, propagating rifts. Here we use new geochronological, tectonic, and paleomagnetic data that we acquired mostly in the southeastern part of Afar to examine the geometry, kinematics, and time-space evolution of faulting related to strain transfer processes. It appears that transfer of strain is accommodated by a bookshelf faulting mechanism wherever rifts or plate boundaries happen to overlap without being connected. This mechanism implies the rotation about a vertical axis of small rigid blocks along rift-parallel faults that are shown to slip with a left-lateral component, which is as important as their normal component of slip (rates of ∼2–3 mm/yr). By contrast, where rifts do not overlap, either a classic transform fault (Maskali) or an oblique transfer zone (Makarrasou) kinematically connects them. The length of the Aden-Red Sea overlap has increased in the last ∼0.9 Myr, as the Aden plate boundary propagated northward into Afar. As a consequence, the first-order blocks that we identify within the overlap did not all rotate during the same time-span nor by the same amounts. Similarly, the major faults that bound them did not necessarily initiate and grow as their neighboring faults did. Despite these variations in strain distribution and kinematics, the overlap kept accommodating a constant amount of strain (7 to 15% of the extension amount imposed by plate driving forces), which remained distributed on a limited number (seven or eight) of major faults, each one having slipped at constant rates (∼3 and 2 mm/yr for vertical and lateral rates, respectively). The fault propagation rates and the block rotation rates that we either measure or deduce are so fast (30–130 mm/yr and 15–38°/Myr, respectively) that they imply that strain transfer processes are transient, as has been shown to be the case for the processes of tearing, rift propagation, and strain jumps in Afar.

Active thrusting offshore Mount Lebanon: Source of the tsunamigenic A.D. 551 Beirut-Tripoli earthquake

On 9 July A.D. 551, a large earthquake, followed by a tsunami, destroyed most of the coastal cities of Phoenicia (modern-day Lebanon). Tripoli is reported to have “drowned,” and Berytus (Beirut) did not recover for nearly 1300 yr afterwards. Geophysical data from the Shalimar survey unveil the source of this event, which may have had a moment magnitude (Mw) of 7.5 and was arguably one of the most devastating historical submarine earthquakes in the eastern Mediterranean: rupture of the offshore, hitherto unknown, ∼100–150-km-long active, east-dipping Mount Lebanon thrust. Deep-towed sonar swaths along the base of prominent bathymetric escarpments reveal fresh, west-facing seismic scarps that cut the sediment-smoothed seafloor. The Mount Lebanon thrust trace comes closest (∼8 km) to the coast between Beirut and Enfeh, where, as 13 14C-calibrated ages indicate, a shoreline-fringing vermetid bench suddenly emerged by ∼80 cm in the sixth century A.D. At Tabarja, the regular vertical separation (∼1 m) of higher fossil benches suggests uplift by three more earthquakes of comparable size since the Holocene sea level reached a maximum ca. 7–6 ka, implying a 1500-1750 yr recurrence time. Unabated thrusting on the Mount Lebanon thrust likely drove the growth of Mount Lebanon since the late Miocene.