Earthquake and Active Tectonics of the Lurestan Arc
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This is a repository copy of The 12 November 2017 Mw 7.3 Ezgeleh‐ Sarpolzahab (Iran) Earthquake and Active Tectonics of the Lurestan Arc. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/141427/ Version: Published Version Article: Nissen, E, Ghods, A, Karasözen, E et al. (12 more authors) (2019) The 12 November 2017 Mw 7.3 Ezgeleh‐ Sarpolzahab (Iran) Earthquake and Active Tectonics of the Lurestan Arc. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 124 (2). pp. 2124-2152. ISSN 2169-9356 https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JB016221 Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ RESEARCH ARTICLE The 12 November 2017 Mw 7.3 Ezgeleh-Sarpolzahab (Iran) 10.1029/2018JB016221 Earthquake and Active Tectonics of the Lurestan Arc Key Points: 1,2 3 2 4 •TheMw 7.3 Ezgeleh-Sarpolzahab Edwin Nissen , Abdolreza Ghods , Ezgi Karasözen , John R. Elliott , earthquake ruptured a gently dipping William D. Barnhart5 , Eric A. Bergman6 , Gavin P. Hayes7 , oblique fault in the Lurestan arc 3 8 1 9 basement Mohammadreza Jamal-Reyhani , Majid Nemati , Fengzhou Tan , Wathiq Abdulnaby , • This faulting may be pervasive across Harley M. Benz7 , Mohammad P. Shahvar10, Morteza Talebian11, and Ling Chen12 the Lurestan arc, though it is unlikely seismogenic everywhere 1School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, 2Department of • Relocated aftershocks correlate Geophysics, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA, 3Department of Earth Sciences, Institute for Advanced strongly with directivity implying a 4 component of dynamic triggering Studies in Basic Sciences, Zanjan, Iran, COMET, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK, 5Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA, 6Global Seismological Services, Golden, CO, USA, 7National Earthquake Information Center, U. S. Geological Survey, Golden, CO, USA, Supporting Information: 8Department of Geology and Earthquake Research Center, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Kerman, Iran, • Supporting Information S1 9Geology Department, College of Science, University of Basrah, Basrah, Iraq, 10Road, Housing and Urban Development Research Center, Building and Housing Research Network, Tehran, Iran, 11Research Institute for Earth Sciences, 12 Correspondence to: Geological Survey of Iran, Tehran, Iran, Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, E. Nissen, China [email protected] Abstract The 12 November 2017 M 7.3 Ezgeleh-Sarpolzahab earthquake is the largest instrumentally Citation: w Nissen, E., Ghods, A., Karasözen, A., recorded earthquake in the Zagros Simply Folded Belt by a factor of ∼10 in seismic moment. Exploiting Elliott, J. R. Barnhart, W. D. Bergman, local, regional, and teleseismic data and synthetic aperture radar interferometry imagery, we characterize E. A., et al. (2019). The 12 November the rupture, its aftershock sequence, background seismicity, and regional tectonics. The mainshock 2017 Mw 7.3 Ezgeleh-Sarpolzahab (Iran) earthquake and active tectonics ruptured slowly (∼2 km/s), unilaterally southward, for ∼40 km along an oblique (dextral-thrust) fault that ◦ of the Lurestan arc. Journal of dips ∼14 E beneath the northwestern Lurestan arc. Slip is confined to basement depths of ∼12–18 km, Geophysical Research: Solid resolvably beneath the sedimentary cover which is ∼8 km thick in this area. The gentle dip angle and Earth, 124, 2124–2152. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JB016221 basement location allow for a broad slip area, explaining the large magnitude relative to earthquakes in the main Fars arc of the Zagros, where shallower, steeper faults are limited in rupture extent by weak sedimentary layers. Early aftershocks concentrate around the southern and western edges of the Received 12 JUN 2018 Accepted 18 JAN 2019 mainshock slip area and therefore cluster in the direction of rupture propagation, implying a contribution Accepted article online 25 JAN 2019 from dynamic triggering. A cluster of events ∼100 km to the south near Mandali (Iraq) reactivated ◦ Published online 16 FEB 2019 the ∼50 dipping Zagros Foredeep Fault. The basement fault responsible for the Ezgeleh-Sarpolzahab earthquake probably accounts for the ∼1 km elevation contrast between the Lurestan arc and the Kirkuk embayment but is distinct from sections of the Mountain Front Fault that define frontal escarpments elsewhere in the Zagros. It may be related to a seismic interface underlying the central and southern Lurestan arc, and a key concern is whether or not the more extensive regional structure is also seismogenic. 1. Introduction The Zagros range in southwestern Iran is an archetype fold-and-thrust belt at the leading edge of the Arabia-Eurasia continental collision zone (Figure 1a), which accommodates approximately one third of its overall ∼20 to 30 mm/year convergence rate (Vernant et al., 2004). Within the Zagros, an ∼8 to 14 km-thick sequence of Phanerozoic sediments is folded and faulted in response to this collision, with active shortening focused within the frontal part of the range, known as the Simply Folded Belt (SFB; Walpersdorf et al., 2006). This is further subdivided along-strike into the mountainous Lurestan and Fars arcs, the lower-lying Kirkuk and Dezful embayments, and the sharp southeastern Oman syntaxis (Figure 2a). The SFB is unusual among major continental plate boundary zones in the complete absence of surface-rupturing earthquakes. It is char- acterized by a large number of moderate (Mw 5–6) earthquakes, mostly with shallow (∼5–10 km) centroid depths consistent with rupture within the sedimentary cover (Nissen et al., 2011; Figures 1a and 2). Prior ©2019. American Geophysical Union. to 2017, the instrumental record lacked earthquakes larger than Mw 6.7, in stark contrast with many other All Rights Reserved. regions of Iran where Mw > 7, surface-rupturing earthquakes are well known (e.g., Berberian & Yeats, 1999). NISSEN ET AL. 2124 Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 10.1029/2018JB016221 Figure 1. (a) Tectonic setting of the Zagros Mountains. Gray circles show M > 5 earthquake epicenters from the International Seismological Centre Bulletin (spanning 1909–2018), black lines show major active faults, and vectors show GPS velocities in a stable Eurasia reference frame (Vernant et al., 2004). (b) Regional station coverage used for earthquake relocations and first motions focal mechanisms (see text for details), and the extents of Sentinel interferograms used to study the 2017 Sarpolzahab mainshock, labeled by track number (interferograms from tracks 072A and 006D used to study the 2018 Mandali earthquakes are not shown). This may reflect the compartmentalization of steep reverse faults by weak evaporitic layers in the lower to middle sedimentary cover, limiting downdip rupture widths for shallow earthquakes (Copley et al., 2015; Elliott et al., 2015; Koyi et al., 2000; Nissen et al., 2011). The seismicity accounts for a relatively minor (up to ∼20%) proportion of the known geodetic deformation (Barnhart et al., 2013; Masson et al., 2005; Palano et al., 2018), with the remainder likely accounted for by folding of sedimentary rocks, aseismic fault slip (Barnhart & Lohman, 2013), and ductile shortening of the basement (Allen et al., 2013). On 12 November 2017 at 18:18 UTC, a Mw 7.3 earthquake struck the northwestern SFB, with an epicen- ter near the Iranian town of Ezelgeh, a few kilometers east of the border with Iraq in the western Lurestan arc. More than 600 people were killed, mostly in Sarpolzahab, a larger Iranian town (population ∼90,000) ∼50 km south of Ezgeleh. Villages of the Zahab plain, north of Sarpolzahab, also suffered very heavy damage. We refer to the event as the Ezgeleh-Sarpolzahab earthquake, though elsewhere it has been termed the Dar- bandikhan earthquake after the Iraqi town ∼35 km NW of Ezgeleh (Barnhart et al., 2018). The earthquake was surprising in that its moment is about 10 times that of the previous largest instrumental earthquakes in the SFB, the 1972 Ghir and 1977 Khurgu earthquakes, both Mw 6.7 reverse faulting events in the Fars arc; there are no clear historical examples of earthquakes exceeding M ∼7 in the SFB either (Ambraseys & Melville, 1982). The mechanism of the Ezgeleh-Sarpolzahab mainshock is also rather unusual, with auto- mated solutions from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Global Centroid Moment Tensor (GCMT) catalogs both indicating oblique dextral-reverse slip on a gentle (11–19◦) east dipping fault plane or oblique sinistral-reverse slip on a steep (79–89◦) SSW dipping plane (Table 1). Previously, most of the largest earth- quakes in the SFB have involved predominantly reverse slip on moderately dipping (∼20–60◦ dipping) fault planes (Nissen et al., 2011; Talebian & Jackson, 2004). Furthermore, neither nodal plane aligns closely with blind thrust faults inferred in this region, which are shown dipping toward the NE (Berberian, 1995). The aims of this paper are twofold. (1) First, we document the source characteristics of the Ezgeleh-Sarpolzahab mainshock and its early aftershocks (up to 1 April 2018) using a comprehensive set of seismic and geodetic data. This not only includes freely available synthetic aperture radar interferometry NISSEN ET AL. 2125 Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 10.1029/2018JB016221 Figure 2. (a) Active faults and earthquake focal mechanisms of the Zagros in an oblique Mercator projection with equator azimuth N130◦E.