Abstract
The Palghar region (north Maharashtra, India), located in the northwestern part of the stable continental region of India, experienced a low magnitude earthquake swarm, which was initiated in September 2018 and is continuing to date (as of October 2021). From December 2018 to December 2020, ~5000 earthquakes with magnitudes from M1.2 to M3.8 occurred in a small region of 20 × 10 km2. These earthquakes were probably triggered by fluid migration during seasonal rainfall. In this study, we have used multi-temporal Landsat satellite data of the year 2000, 2015, 2018, 2019, and 2020, extracted lineaments, and studied the changes in frequency and pattern of lineaments before and after the initiation of the swarm in the Palghar region. An increase in the lineament density and amount of rainfall are found to be associated with the increasing frequency of earthquakes.
Highlights
Academic Editor: Andrei TroninThe earthquakes in the Indian shield are common, in the past numerous small to large earthquakes have occurred in many parts [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The Palghar swarm has been investigated in different ways, e.g., through monsoon induced hydro-seismicity which seems to be corroborated with the trends of lineaments/dykes in the region [43], InSAR analysis which revealed subsidence of ~3 cm between November 2018 to May 2019 in the earthquake swarm region [45]
To justify this assumed idea, we have further focused on multi-temporal lineaments changes observations in and around earthquake swarm activities broadly focused on the large AOI sub-setting from single satellite scene, subsequently applied for all temporal scenes have clearly identified seismicity in the large areas with the movement occurred in the two different directions as NE-SW and NNE-SSW trends, which is consistent with the neotectonics lines, with several other faults lines in the earthquake swarm areas
Summary
The earthquakes in the Indian shield are common, in the past numerous small to large earthquakes have occurred in many parts [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. These earthquakes occur along well-known lineaments and faults. Earthquake swarm (clustering of earthquakes) activities in time and space are common and observed in many parts of the country [40,41,42,43,44,45,46]. Earthquake swarms are triggered either due to a nearby large magnitude earthquake or due to the movement of water through fracture (weak) zones [42,43]
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