Present-day stress state in northwestern Syria

Abstract

Northwestern Syria is a key area in the eastern Mediterranean to study the active tectonics and stress pattern across the Arabia-Eurasia convergent plate boundary. This study aims to outline the present-day stress regime in this region of Syria using the fault plane solutions of the largest events recorded by the Syrian National Seismological Network from 1995 to 2011. A dataset of fault-plane solutions was obtained for 48 events having at least 5 P-wave polarities. The tectonic regime for most of these events is extensional and produces normal mechanisms in agreement with the local configurations of the seismogenic faults in the region. Strike-slip mechanisms are more scarce and restricted to certain areas, such as the northern extension of the Dead Sea fault system. The results of the current study reveal the spatial variations of SHmax orientation across the northwestern Syria region. This spatial variation of the present-day stress field highlights the role of main geometrically complex shear zones in the present-day stress pattern of northwestern Syria. However, these results show, regardless of the relatively small magnitudes of the studied events, they provide a picture of the local stress deviations that have currently been taking place along the local active faults.