LATE QUATERNARY PALEOEARTHQUAKES ON THE MIDDLE SEGMENT OF THE LIJIANG-XIAOJINHE FAULT,SOUTHEASTERN TIBET

More attention has been paid to the late Quaternary activity of the boundary fault of the Sichuan-Yunnan block in eastern Tibet. The Lijiang-Xiaojinhe Fault (LXF) locates along the boundary of the northwest Sichuan and central Yunnan sub-blocks in the Sichuan-Yunnan block. Clear displaced landforms show that the fault has undergone strong late-Quaternary activity. However there is no surface-rupturing earthquake occurring on the LXF in the historical record. The LXF crosses the city of Lijiang, one of the most important tourist cities in Southwest China. The rupture behavior on this fault remains unclear and it is hard to assess its seismic hazard in the future. In this study, on the base of the interpretation of high-resolution satellite imagery, we chose the middle segment of the LXF and dug three trenches at Muzhuda, Hongxing, and Gantangzi sites to constrain the ages of paleoearthquakes combined with radiocarbon dating and OxCal modeling. The Muzhuda trench shows that at least three events occurred on the middle segment of the LXF at 7 940~6 540a BP, 4 740~4 050a BP and 1 830~420a BP, respectively. The Hongxing trench indicates that the LXF underwent two events at 5 120~3 200a BP and 2 100~1 220a BP. The Gantangzi trench reveals at least three paleoearthquakes at 44 980~17 660a BP, 7 210~3 810a BP and 2 540~1 540a BP, respectively. The events in the Gantangzi trench might be incomplete because of stratigraphic gap. These three trenches indicate that three events occurred on the middle segment of the LXF in the Holocene at 7 940~7 210a BP, 4 740~4 050a BP and 1 830~1 540a BP, respectively. Large earthquakes on the middle segment of the LXF appear to fit the quasi-periodic model with the mean recurrence interval of~3 000a and the estimated magnitude 7.5. Given the strong late-Quaternary activity of the middle segment of the LXF and a long elapsed time, we propose that the middle segment of the LXF might have a high seismic hazard potential in the near future.