Rupture process of the January 8, 2022, Menyuan M 6.9 earthquake

Abstract

After the occurrence of destructively strong earthquakes, rapid acquisition of the source rupture process can provide important reference information for post-earthquake disaster relief and aftershock trend determination. An M 6.9 earthquake occurred in Menyuan County, Qinghai Province on January 8, 2022. The epicenter is located in the seismic gap in the middle section of the Haiyuan fault belt. Such a typical strong earthquake was taken as an example to investigate the rupture process of strong earthquakes. Three days after the earthquake, the InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) coseismic deformation field was obtained by Sentinel radar, indicating that the surface ruptured obviously. The southern block of the earthquake faces towards the satellite about 95 ​cm along the LOS (line of sight) direction, and the northern block is away from the satellite by ​∼ ​74 ​cm, consistent with the characteristic of left-lateral strike-slip motion. In this study, InSAR coseismic deformation data and far-field waveform data were used to jointly invert the earthquake rupture process, and a four-segment finite fault model was constructed by referring to the surface deformation. The inversion results show that the focal depth of the Menyuan earthquake is about 7 ​km, and the strike of the seismogenic fault is 89.0°, 104.0°, 119.0° and 131.0° from west to east, respectively. It is a high-dip left-lateral strike-slip earthquake event lasting about 14 ​s. The rupture propagation mode is a bilateral extension. The maximum slip along the fault is about 380 ​cm, and the seismic moment magnitude is 6.7. The surface rupture length is about 24 ​km, which is consistent with that measured in the field survey. The detailed seismic source model can provide basic data for the aftershock trend determination and seismic risk analysis of the adjacent active faults.