Coseismic deformation and slip distribution of the 1997 MwMw7.5 Manyi, Tibet, earthquake from InSAR measurements

We use interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) observations to investigate the coseismic deformation and slip distribution of the 1997 MwMw7.5 Manyi earthquake, a left-lateral strike-slip earthquake occurred on the west portion of the Kunlun fault in the northern Tibet, China. The fault trace is constrained by the combination of interferometric coherence image and azimuth offset image. The total length of the identified fault is about 170 km. We estimate the source parameters using a seven-segment fault model in a homogeneous elastic half-space. We first use a uniform slip model to estimate the slip, width, dip and rake for each segment, resulting in a maximum slip of 5.5 m with a depth of 11 km on the fourth segment. The average dip of the uniform slip model is about 93° northward and the average rake is about −2°. We then use a distributed slip model to estimate the pure strike-slip and oblique slip distribution, respectively. In the distributed slip model, the fault plane is discretized into 225 patches, each of them 4 km × 4 km. We fix the optimal geometric parameters and solve for the slip distribution using a bounded variable least-squares (BVLS) method. We find a geodetic moment of 1.91 × 1020 Nm (MwMw7.5), of which almost 68% released in the uppermost 8 km and 82% in the uppermost 12 km. For all the models used in this study, the synthetic profiles along strike show asymmetric displacements on the opposite sides of the fault, which are in agreement with the observations. This suggests that a linear elastic model with variable and non-vertical dips is also reasonable for the mechanism of the Manyi earthquake.