A Seismogenic Zone Model for Seismic Hazard Studies in Northwestern Africa

Geodetic Deformation versus Seismic Crustal Moment-Rates: Insights from the Ibero-Maghrebian Region

“…[23] and references therein. Seismic source zones (Betics seismic source zones-BET1, BET2, BET3, BET4, BET5, BET6; Atlas seismogenic sources-HA, HA-AA, HA-MA, SA1, SA2, TA represent High, Middle, Saharan, and Tunisian Atlas, as well as the northeastern part of the Anti-Atlas; Levante seismogenic regions-LEV1, LEV2; Moroccan Meseta-High Plateaus seismic source zones-MA-HP, MM; Rif seismogenic sources-R1a, R1b, R2; Tell seismogenic source zones-T1, T2, T3, T4, T5, T6) analyzed in this study are also reported as blue solid polygons [24,25]. The map is plotted in an oblique Mercator projection.…”

“…The study area has been divided into twenty-five crustal seismogenic source zones ( Figure 1) by taking into account the seismic zonation available in recent literature [24,25,50], which have been defined on the basis of the latest tectonic, geological, and seismological considerations. Some of these zones are well-defined on the basis of constraints coming from the analysis of the earthquake catalog (stationarity of the completeness periods, evaluation of the mean activity rate) and from a set of geological and seismotectonic considerations, such as style, geometry, and distribution of fault systems (with direct evidence of Holocene activity) and their relation to the local stress and deformation regimes.…”

“…The seismic sources adopted for the Moroccan-Algeria-Tunisian region come from [24] and slightly updated in [50]. For this region, the general criterion adopted in [24,50] was to delimit areas with similar tectonic features and a more or less homogeneous stress pattern and seismicity parameters. Individual faults were not specifically considered because of the very scarce availability of kinematic, seismic and paleoseismic observations in this region.…”

“…These zones are based on the previous works by [51][52][53]. T1 to T4 sources display a dominant compression striking NNW-SSE, whereas the T5 source exhibits a N-S-striking compressional strike-slip regime (e.g., [24,49,54]. Few focal mechanisms are available for the T6 source and therefore the mean stress regime is poorly constrained (Figure 2c).…”

“…Because of the large uncertainties of MA-HP and SA1, we also reported the recomputed a and b values (see the main text for details); in curved brackets the original values. Adopted parameters are detailed in Table 1; as a first step, we used the values already reported in literature [24,25]. As described in [24,25], a and b parameters have been directly computed from available catalogs by adopting the maximum likelihood method [59].…”