New Insights on Seismicity and the Velocity Structure beneath the Western Segment of the North Anatolian Fault Zone

Abstract:

To extensively investigate the upper crustal structure beneath the western segment of the North Anatolian Fault Zone (NAFZ) in Sakarya and the surroundings, a temporary seismic network consisting of 70 stations (with nearly 7km station spacing) was deployed in early May 2012 and operated for 18 months during the Faultlab experiment encompassing both the northern and southern strands of the fault in between the area of 1999 İzmit and Düzce mainshock ruptures. With the help of this new and extensive data set, our main objective is to provide new insights on the most recent micro-seismic activity and the velocity structure beneath the region. Out of 2437 events contaminated by the explosions, we extracted 1344 well located earthquakes with a total of 31595 P and 18512 S phase readings which lead to an avarage Vp/Vs ratio of ~1.82 extracted from the wadati diagram. The enhanced station coverage decreased the magnitude threshold to 0.1 where the horizontal and vertical location errors did not exceed 0.5 km and 2.0 km, respectively. Average RMS values were calculated within the range of 0.05-0.4 seconds. We observed significant seismic activity along both branches of the fault where the depth of the seismogenic zone was confined to 15 km. Focal parameters of 41 earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 1.8 were also determined using both Regional Moment Tensor Inversion and P first arrival time methods. Focal mechanism solutions confirm that Sakarya and its vicinity could be defined by a compressional regime showing a primarily oblique-slip motion character. Furthermore, we selected the earthquakes recorded by at least 8 stations with azimuthal gaps less than 200° for the ongoing tomographic inversion that would enable us to accurately map the complex upper crustal velocity structure with high resolution beneath this segment of the NAFZ.