Reviewing the active stress field in Central Asia by using a modified stress tensor approach

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Central Asia and its surroundings constitute a geodynamically complicated region, where almost all types of tectonic patterns can be observed. A triple junction, collision, and subduction zones, as well as extended fault systems of all types prevail in different parts of this region and compose one of the most interesting and complex geotectonic environments on Earth. This complicated setting is also associated with intense deformation, resulting in a large number of high seismicity zones, where numerous strong earthquakes occur, also extending, in some cases, to intermediate depths. Several previous studies have focused on specific seismotectonic zones in order to assess the active tectonic setting and the associated stress regime. We attempt to provide a unified but detailed picture of the stress field variability for the entire central Asia region, using the well-known inversion method proposed by Gephart and Forsyth (1984), modified in the present work on the basis of Fisher statistics. For this application, we employ a large number of focal mechanisms, spatially separated in 138 data groups. Τhe proposed modified algorithm (FD-BSM) examines the Fisher distribution of all possible stress principal axes solutions and select the one that: (a) shows the smallest angle variation from the Fisher mean in all three principal distributions and (b) minimizes the difference between the theoretical and observed slip vectors of the employed fault plane solution data. Synthetic tests and comparison of the corresponding results with real data show that, in cases where the stress regime is not clearly uniform or the number of available data is rather small, the models selected by the modified approach (FD-BSM) are more robust and show better spatial coherence compared to the initial Gephart and Forsyth (1984) method or alternative techniques such as the method of Michael (1984, 1987) as adapted by Vavrycuk (2014).