Delineation of Urban Active Faults Using Multi-scale Gravity Analysis in Shenzhen, South China

Abstract:

In fact, many cities in the world are established on the active faults. As the rapid urban development, thousands of large facilities, such as ultrahigh buildings, supersized bridges, railway, and so on, are built near or on the faults, which may change the balance of faults and induce urban earthquake. Therefore, it is significant to delineate effectively the faults for urban planning construction and social sustainable development. Due to dense buildings in urban area, the ordinary approaches to identify active faults, like geological survey, artificial seismic exploration and electromagnetic exploration, are not convenient to be carried out. Gravity, reflecting the mass distribution of the Earth’s interior, provides a more efficient and convenient method to delineate urban faults. The present study is an attempt to propose a novel gravity method, multi-scale gravity analysis, for identifying urban active faults and determining their stability. Firstly, the gravity anomalies are decomposed by wavelet multi-scale analysis. Secondly, based on the decomposed gravity anomalies, the crust is layered and the multilayer horizontal tectonic stress is inverted. Lastly, the decomposed anomalies and the inverted horizontal tectonic stress are used to infer the distribution and stability of main active faults. For validating our method, a case study on active faults in Shenzhen City is processed. The results show that the distribution of decomposed gravity anomalies and multilayer horizontal tectonic stress are controlled significantly by the strike of the main faults and can be used to infer depths of the faults. The main faults in Shenzhen may range from 4km to 20km in the depth. Each layer of the crust is nearly equipressure since the horizontal tectonic stress has small amplitude. It indicates that the main faults in Shenzhen are relatively stable and have no serious impact on planning and construction of the city.