Abstract
Online material: Field-measured offsets of the surface rupture. The Ms 7.1 Yushu earthquake on 14 April 2010, 07:49:38 (epicenter, 36.2°N 96.6°E; focal depth, 14 km; http://www.csi.ac.cn/manage/html/4028861611c5c2ba0111c5c558b00001/qhyushu7.1/index.html (in Chinese) was located in a remote, mountainous, and sparsely populated region ∼30 km west of Yushu, Qinghai, China. The earthquake, which resulted in 2,698 dead, 12,135 injured, and 270 missing persons, caused widespread damage in the central Tibetan Plateau. (http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2010-05-31/162820381075.shtml; in Chinese). The quake occurred along the Yushu segment of the Ganzi (Garze)-Yushu fault (Chen et al. 2010; Lin, Rao et al. 2011), which constitutes the NW-SE–striking Xianshuihe fault system (Figure 1), a principal left-lateral strike-slip fault system accommodating eastward extrusion of crustal blocks of the eastern Tibetan Plateau due to the collision between the Indian and Eurasian plates. The Xianshuihe fault accommodates approximately 5–15 mm/yr of the lateral motion, which is around one-third of the overall eastward motion of Tibet (Allen et al. 1991; Zhou et al. 1997; Wen et al. 2003; Peng et al. 2006). The Yushu earthquake is the first rapidly investigated moderate strike-slip event in Tibet. In general, the mapping of surface ruptures is best made immediately after an earthquake, when fragile and ephemeral structural features associated with faulting are fresh. Our field observations were made from April 24 to April 30. An important finding is that the mapped fracture pattern is compatible with a self-similar hierarchical system of deformation that involves segment structures at three different scales, which range from kilometer-scale fault sections, to hundreds to tens of meter-scale fracture arrays, to meter-scale individual fractures. Surface ruptures of the Yushu earthquake are composed of three sections, each of which is separated by en echelon step-over structures (Figures 2 and 3). Each section is accompanied by mole tracks, en echelon shear fractures, and …
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