Potential of future seismogenesis in Hebei Province (NE China) due to stress interactions between strong earthquakes

• Important active faults for seismic hazard assessment in Beijing and nearby cities.
• Fault parameters necessary for the calculations are known from field investigations.
• Modeling all strong (M > 5.0) shocks in Hebei Province since the beginning of the 20th century.
• Calculation of probabilities after examining every possible scenario of fault failure (76 characters).

Northeast China, a densely populated area, is affected by intense seismic activity, which includes large events that caused extensive disaster and tremendous loss of life. For contributing to the continuous efforts for seismic hazard assessment, the earthquake potential from the active faults near the cities of Zhangjiakou and Langfang in Hebei Province is examined. We estimate the effect of the coseismic stress changes of strong (M ⩾ 5.0) earthquakes on the major regional active faults, and mapped Coulomb stress change onto these target faults. More importantly our calculations reveal that positive stress changes caused by the largest events of the 1976 Tangshan sequence make the Xiadian and part of Daxing fault, thus considered the most likely sites of the next strong earthquake in the study area. The accumulated static stress changes that reached a value of up to 0.4 bar onto these faults, were subsequently incorporated in earthquake probability estimates for the next 30 years.