The Causative Fault of the 2016 Mwp 6.1 Petermann Ranges Intraplate Earthquake (Central Australia) Retrieved by C- and L-Band InSAR Data

Marco Polcari,Christian Bignami,Salvatore Stramondo,Matteo Albano,Simone Atzori

doi:10.3390/rs10081311

Marco Polcari, Christian Bignami + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10081311

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Journal: Remote sensing	Publication Date: Aug 20, 2018
Citations: 20	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia

Abstract

On 21 May 2016, an Mwp 6.1 earthquake occurred along the Petermann Ranges in Central Australia. Such a seismic event can be classified as a rare intraplate earthquake because the affected area presents low seismicity, being at the center of the Indo-Australian plate. Also, the architecture and kinematics of shear zones in the Petermann Orogen are largely unknown. We used Sentinel-1 C-band descending data and ALOS-2 L-band ascending data to constrain the causative fault. Our analysis revealed that the earthquake nucleated along an unmapped secondary back-thrust of the main feature of the area, namely the Woodroffe thrust.

Highlights

The Earth’s dynamics and tectonic phenomena occurring on its surface are well explained by the Plate Tectonics model [1,2,3], which is accepted by the majority of scientists
The SAR data used to highlight the coseismic ground deformation consisted of two pairs of Single Look Complex (SLC) images provided by the Sentinel-1A mission, the first satellite of the Sentinel-1 SAR-oriented constellation of the European Space Agency (ESA), and by the ALOS-2 mission of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)
We processed the InSAR data with the help of GAMMA software [25], exploiting the packages specially designed for Sentinel-1 data [26]

Summary

Introduction

The Earth’s dynamics and tectonic phenomena occurring on its surface are well explained by the Plate Tectonics model [1,2,3], which is accepted by the majority of scientists. That is the case with most of the earthquakes occurring in the African continent [10], for example, due to the East African Rift System (EARS), which is slowly splitting the African Plate into two tectonic plates. In some cases, such as in the US state of Oklahoma, seismic events are induced by anthropic activities, such as hydraulic fracking, mining, or hydrocarbon extraction [11]. The effects of such earthquakes can be rather devastating, especially considering that the regions where they occur are not considered seismically hazardous and local residents are often unprepared to manage a seismic emergency [12]

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