The current state of crustal stresses in the Caucasus according to the unified catalogue of earthquake focal mechanisms

Abstract

The current state of crustal stresses in the Caucasus and adjacent territories has been reconstructed. Stress inversion was performed by the cataclastic analysis of earthquake focal mechanisms considered as seismological strain indicators. The data were taken from the unified catalogue of focal mechanisms of the Northern Eurasia, which was consolidated by the Laboratory of Tectonophysics of IPE RAS in the early 1990s. It contains the information from many seismological data sources of various authors who worked both in the USSR and abroad. Seismological data for the last years after the collapse of the USSR were taken from Global CMT catalogue. The study area has been quite densely covered by reconstructions of the principal stress axes. At the same time, the area of stress averaging has been considerably reduced by the iterative use of a window for stress averaging, which was gradually expanded for zones with reduced densities of earthquake epicenters. The revealed regularities of the current stress field based on the unified catalogue of focal mechanisms collected by different authors correlate with the reconstructions performed according to the Global CMT catalogue. The cataclastic analysis of displacements along fractures allowed estimating the stress magnitudes, and the crust of the study area was zoned with respect to the intensity of normalized values of the lowest and highest stresses of horizontal compression, as well as to the normalized values of shear stresses acting on the crustal basement. In all cases, the values were normalized to the rock strength. The stress parameters are presented in “Tectonic Stresses of Eurasia”. This new Internet resource created by the Laboratory of Tectonophysics on the IPE RAS website shows the stress data in different scales and levels of details.