Study of Active Faults in the Three Gorges Dam region by Detecting and Relocating Aftershocks

Abstract:

Seismicity in the Three Gorges Dam (TGD) region and its adjacent areas increased dramatically as the water- level of the TGD reservoir rises since its completion in 2003. Accordingly, many efforts have been put forward to quantify the seismicity and geological hazards in the region. However, the precise detective of earthquakes, especially for the minor ones, remains difficulty because of sparse distribution of permanent seismic stations. From December 2013 to June 2014, we deployed 30 three-component broadband seismic stations in the TGD region. During the deployment, we recorded two earthquakes of magnitudes lager than 5.0, one occurred on December 16th 2013 in Badong and another on March 30th 2014 in Zigui. We firstly used a sliding-window cross-correlation (SCC) detection technique to supplement the events catalog from the China Earthquake Networks Center. Over 500 new events with ML lager than 0.5 were detected. We then relocated 502 events out of the total 987 events using the double-difference (DD) relocation algorithm. We also determined moment tensors of some large earthquakes using gCAP. The results clearly show two active faults along Yangtze River with dips of 50 degrees and 90 degrees to a maximum depth of 10 km, respectively. And they also reveal that water might have permeated to a depth of 6 km corresponds to the interface of sediments and metamorphic basement beneath Zigui Basin. We thus preliminarily judge that the quakes are triggered by local stress adjustment resulting of fluctuation of Three Gorges reservoir’s loading.