Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America; October 2006; v. 96; no. 5;
p. 1729-1741; DOI: 10.1785/0120050200
© 2006 Seismological Society of America
A Study of the 14 November 2001 Kokoxili Earthquake: History and Geometry of the Rupture from Teleseismic Data and Field Observations
Audrey Tocheport1,
Luis Rivera1 and
Jérôme Van der Woerd1
1 Institut de Physique du Globe
UMR
7516, 5 rue René Descartes
67084 Strasbourg Cedex, France
A study of the 14 November 2001 Kokoxili earthquake is performed to estimate
the source parameters from teleseismic body-wave inversion. The earthquake broke
the western Kusai Hu segment of the eastwest trending Kunlun strike- slip
fault, with the presence of surface rupture traces over 400 km. This event of
Mw 7.8
(Harvard CMT, 2001) was followed
by moderate but continuous seismic activity. We apply an inversion method of
complex body waves with multiple subevents
(Kikuchi and Kanamori, 1991) to
model the waveforms and to understand the rupture process. Field observations
are used to constrain the inversion and to evaluate the solution. Considering
the western complexities of the Kusai Hu segment, we invert the first part of
the data to model the initiation of the rupture. The rupture is found to begin
on the fault branch lying southwest of the Buka Daban Peak. Although the rupture
propagates dominantly eastward, some subevents systematically appear to the west
of the epicenter. Then, an inversion of the complete body-wave traces shows that
the rupture propagated unilaterally eastward along the straight part of the
Kusai Hu segment.
Copyright © 2009 by Seismological Society of America