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Strong earthquake clustering around the eastern Tibetan Plateau after the 2008 MW7.9 Wenchuan earthquake

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Abstract

After the 2008 MW7.9 Wenchuan earthquake, the eastern Tibetan Plateau experienced a series of MW>6.0 earthquakes, including the 2013 MW6.6 Lushan, 2014 MW6.1 Kangding and 2017 MW6.5 Jiuzhaigou events. Based on available constraints, we build a three-dimensional viscoelastic finite element model to calculate Coulomb failure stress caused by these strong earthquakes. In this model, the geometry and slip vector of the initial rupture zone of each earthquake are used to better evaluate the earthquake-related stress projection. Considering reasonable ranges of viscosities for the crust and upper mantle in different tectonic units, numerical results show that after the Wenchuan earthquake, the coseismic Coulomb failure stress change at the hypocenters of the subsequent earthquakes increased to approximately +0.012–+0.040, +0.01–+0.03, and +0.008–+0.015 MPa, respectively. With viscoelastic relaxation of the lower crust and upper mantle, the Coulomb failure stress change at the hypocenters of these earthquakes accumulated to about +0.014–+0.042, +0.016–+0.036, and +0.003–+0.007 MPa just before their occurrence. This suggests that the Wenchuan earthquake indeed triggered or hastened the occurrence of the Lushan, Kangding and Jiuzhaigou events, supporting that strong earthquake clustering around the eastern Tibetan Plateau could be related to stress interaction between the seismogenic faults. Besides, ~94% and ~6% of the stress increase around (and before the occurrence of) the Kangding earthquake were contributed by the Wenchuan event and the Lushan event, respectively; the positive Coulomb failure stress change at the Jiuzhaigou earthquake hypocenter was related to coseismic slip partitioning of the Wenchuan earthquake. This means that stress interaction among the earthquakes could be controlled by the combined effect of stress of the previous events and by the complexity of earthquake ruptures. Thus, in researches on the earthquake-triggering mechanism, special attentions should be paid on both details of the rupture model and multiple factors of previous earthquakes.

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Acknowledgements

We thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Some figures were plotted by using the GMT software (Wessel and Smith, 1998). This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA20070302), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41674104 & 41274064) and the 13th Five-year Informatization Plan of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XXH13505–06).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Continental Collision and Plateau Uplift, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Bei**g, 100101, China

    Duyuan Xu, Jie **ao, Jiankun He & Weimin Wang

  2. CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Bei**g, 100101, China

    Jiankun He

  3. College of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Bei**g, 100049, China

    Duyuan Xu

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  1. Duyuan Xu
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Correspondence to Jiankun He.

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Xu, D., **ao, J., He, J. et al. Strong earthquake clustering around the eastern Tibetan Plateau after the 2008 MW7.9 Wenchuan earthquake. Sci. China Earth Sci. 63, 999–1012 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-019-9581-x

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