A comprehensive model of postseismic deformation of the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman earthquake deduced from GPS observations in northern Sumatra

• Afterslip and Maxwell viscoelastic relaxation explain deformation in northern Sumatra.
• A rheological structure with elastic layer depth of 65 ± 5 km.
• A rheological structure with Maxwell viscosity of 8.0 ± 1 × 1018 Pa s.
• Our model is applicable to the GPS in northern Sumatra, Thailand, and Andaman–Nicobar.

We investigate the postseismic deformation of the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman earthquake (SAE) using 5 years of Global Positioning System (GPS) data located in northern Sumatra. Continuous GPS data from northern Sumatra suggest that the relaxation time in the vertical displacement is longer than horizontal displacements. This implies that there are multiple physical mechanisms that control the postseismic deformation, which refer to afterslip and viscoelastic relaxation. In this study, we introduce an analysis strategy of postseismic deformation to simultaneously calculate multiple mechanisms of afterslip and viscoelastic relaxation. The afterslip inversion results indicate that the distribution of the afterslip and the coseismic slip are compensatory of each other. Also, afterslip has a limited contribution to vertical deformation in northern Sumatra. In our rheology model, we use a gravitational Maxwell viscoelastic response and the result indicates that the elastic layer thickness is 65 ± 5 km and the Maxwell viscosity is 8.0 ± 1.0 × 1018 Pa s. We find that afterslip plus Maxwell viscoelastic relaxation are appropriate to explain the deformation in northern Sumatra. We also find that our rheology model reproduces the long-term features of the GPS time series in Thailand. Applying our rheology model to the data in Andaman Islands our afterslip estimation is located at the down-dip part of the plate boundary. Finally, we showed that our rheology model is applicable to the GPS datasets of postseismic deformation of the 2004 SAE located in northern Sumatra, Thailand, and Andaman–Nicobar, respectively.