Breaking up the hanging wall of a rift-border fault: The 2009 Karonga earthquakes, Malawi

Details Breaking up the hanging wall of a rift-border fault: The 2009 Karonga earthquakes, Malawi Breaking up the hanging wall of a rift-border fault: The 2009 Karonga earthquakes, Malawi

Jun 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010georl..3711305b&link_type=abstract

Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 37, Issue 11, CiteID L11305

Physics

4

Seismology: Earthquake Source Observations (1240), Tectonophysics: Dynamics And Mechanics Of Faulting (8004), Geodesy And Gravity: Tectonic Deformation (6924), Seismology: Body Waves

Scientific paper

The southern East African Rift has an unusually large seismogenic thickness (35-40 km), which is responsible for wide tilted basins and extremely long faults with the potential for M7-8 normal-faulting earthquakes. From 6-19 December 2009, a shallow earthquake sequence (four of Mw > 5.5) hit the Karonga region of northern Lake Malawi. The location is 50 km west of the rift-bounding Livingstone Fault, within the hanging-wall. We used seismology and InSAR to obtain source parameters and combined this with information on rift structure from geomorphology and seismic profiles. The deformation is consistent with rupture of a shallow, west-dipping fault, with no evidence for the involvement of magmatic fluids. Although the Livingstone Fault dominates local geomorphology, the Karonga earthquakes demonstrate that the hanging-wall block is actively breaking up, reflecting temporal and spatial migration of activity or the release of stresses within it.

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