A possible change in stress field orientation due to the 1976 Tangshan earthquake

Abstract

Two techniques are used to study the stress field in the Tangshan region. First, the mean directions of principal stress axes in three subregions of the Tangshan aftershock region are determined from 29 focal mechanism solutions. In doing so a slip-fitting technique is applied which determines the mean stress tensor by minimizing the angle between the observed slip direction on every fault plane and the calculated shear stress resolved onto the fault planes. Each of the two nodal planes of the focal mechanism solutions are alternately considered as a possible fault plane. Second, by making a grid search over all possible orientations of stress axes, the meanP,B andT axes in the Tangshan region, both before and after the Tangshan mainshock, are found on the basis of firstP-wave polarity readings from a number of small earthquakes. The results indicate that there is a possible azimuthal change of the principal stress axes in the focal region due to the occurrence of the mainshock.