Stress triggering effect on the 2022 Honghe MS5.0 earthquake with historical strong earthquakes

Abstract

The 2022 Honghe MS5.0 seismic event is intriguing due to its occurrence in the south of the Red River Fault, an area historically lacking seismic activities greater than MS5.0. To elucidate the seismogenic mechanism and scrutinize stress-triggered interactions, we calculated co-seismic and post-seismic Coulomb stress alterations induced by nine historical seismic events (M ≥ 6.0). The analysis reveals that these substantial seismic events provoked co-seismic stress augmentations of 1.409 bar and post-seismic stress increments of 0.159 bar. Noteworthy seismic events, such as the 1833 Songming, 1877 Shiping, 1913 Eshan, and 1970 Tonghai earthquakes, catalyzed the occurrence of the Honghe earthquake. Areas of heightened future seismic risk include the southern region of the Red River Fault and the eastern segments of the Shiping-Jianshui and Qujiang faults. Additionally, we assessed the correlation between the spatial distribution of aftershocks and the Coulomb stress shift triggered by the mainshock, taking into account the influence of calculation parameter settings.