co-seismic coulomb stress changes and its influences on aftershock distribution and surrounding faults caused by 2014 ludian earthquake,yunnan

The studies of earthquake stress transfer and its influence on regional seismicity have found that earthquake occurrences are highly interactive and correlated rather than isolated and random in traditional point in recently years. A lot of phenomena in earthquake observations such as aftershock distribution, stress shadow, earthquake interaction and migration were well explained based on the theory of earthquake stress interaction. It is important that understanding the process of earthquake interaction could give an insight into the physical mechanism of earthquake cycle, and could help us assess the seismic hazard in future.It has long been recognized that regional stress accumulated by tectonic motion is released when earthquake occurs. When earthquakes occur, the accumulated stress does not vanish completely, but is redistributed through the process of stress transfer, and then the redistributed stress may trigger potential earthquakes. The increment of Coulomb failure stress loading in the certain regions may improve the seismic activities. By contrast, the decrement of Coulomb failure stress in the areas of stress shadow where the stress on faults may unload could lead to the decrement of seismic activities.On August 3, 2014, an M_S6.5 earthquake occurred in Zhaotong-Ludian region, Yunnan Province, China, killing and injuring hundreds of people. Therefore, it is critical to outline the areas with potential aftershocks before reconstruction and re-settlement so as to avoid future disasters. Based on the elastic dislocation theory and multi-layered lithospheric model, we calculate the co-stress changes caused by the Zhaotong-Ludian earthquakes to discuss its influences on aftershock distribution and surrounding faults. It is shown that the Coulomb stress changes based on the rupture in the NNW direction can explain better the aftershock distribution. It indicates that the NNW direction may represent the real rupture. The aftershocks mainly distribute in the regions with increased stress along main rupture and west to the rupture. In other regions with increased stress, the distributions of aftershock are rare which may indicate the low tectonic stress accumulation in these regions. The stress accumulation and corresponding seismic hazard on the southern part of Zhaotong Fault, Qiaojia segment of Zemuhe-Xiaojiang Fault and northeastern part of Lianfeng Fault are further increased by the Zhaotong-Ludian earthquake. We should pay special attention to the southern part of Zhaotong Fault where seismic activity is very high in recently years and the increment of Coulomb failure stress in this area is more than 0.1bar(0.1bar is the threshold of earthquake triggering). In order to make a more objective and comprehensive discussion, we calculate the sensitivity of the parameters such as effective coefficient of friction, the calculated depth and multilayered crustal model.