Slip rates across the sinistral slip fault system of the Shan Plateau, northern SE Asia

Abstract:

The sinistral-slip fault system of the Shan Plateau, arcing around the eastern Himalayan syntaxis and extending > 700 km from northwest to southeast, poses a high seismic hazard in northern SE Asia. Knowing slip rates and earthquake recurrence intervals of these faults is key to better quantification of that hazard. However, estimates of slip rates along the fault system remain poorly constrained.

Here we report a preliminary estimate of the slip rate across the fault system from available campaign GPS velocities. We projected the horizontal GPS velocity vectors relative to the Sunda block reference frame perpendicular to the general strike (~ 240°) of the sinistral faults. The velocity profile shows a gradient of ~ 9 mm/yr over a distance of ~ 550 km that crosses 8 faults, from the Dayingjiang fault in the northwest to the Mengxing fault in the southeast. This suggests the average slip rate across each fault in the system is ~ 1 mm/yr. The 9 mm/yr of GPS velocity gradient across the fault system, however, is only half of the long-term rates determined from offsets of major rivers, ridges and plutons. These geological determinations suffer, however, from poor dating constraints. The discrepancy between the geodetic and geological analyses highlights the need of reliable constraints on slip rates along each of the faults. We have begun field work aimed at determining the slip rate of one of these, the Jinghong fault.