Re-appraisal of seismicity and seismotectonics in the north-eastern Algeria Part II: 20th century seismicity and seismotectonics analysis

The main objective of the research work isthe homogenisation of the two recentAlgerian earthquake catalogues for thecommon covered period of time, from 1900 to1990, for the region under considerationlimited by 33^°N–38^°N,4^°E-9.5^°E] and the updatingof the catalogue for the twentieth century(1900–2000). To mitigate the deficiencyof the incompleteness of catalogue, aneffort was made to establish a correlationbetween surface-wave magnitude Ms andbody-wave magnitude m_b in the form ofMs = a + b (m_b). A complete, exact andhomogeneous earthquake catalogue as much aspossible, comprising 870 seismic events,has been compiled. Seismicity analysis ofthe region shows a strong concentration ofseismicity along a band of no more than400 km width oriented mainly in theeast-west direction parallel to the coast.Moreover, earthquakes in this zone arerather associated to strike-slip mechanism.The focal mechanism show a regional stressregime that corresponds to horizontalcompression in NW-SE to N-S direction. As aresult of the review of the seismicity ofnorth-eastern Algeria from the compilationof checked and corrected data and itscorrelation with other geologic andgeophysical investigations based ondocumentary sources, it was possible toconstruct a most complete seismotectonicmap. It leads also to delineate fourseismogenic zones in the Tellian Atlas, aless important zone in the Saharan Atlas, asixth zone at the boundary of both Atlasand finally, a seventh one along thecoastal zone. The seismicity-active faultscorrelation of some of these defined zonesis examined in details with a specialattention to the Saharan Atlas zone, theHodna and Biban zone as well as Soummam andBabor zone where further research workallowed to find some neotectonic featuresconsidered as a significant sign of recenttectonic activity.