Focal mechanism of Badr earthquake, Saudia Arabia of August 27, 2009

Aldamegh, Khalid; Hussein, H. M.; Alarifi, Saud; Moustafa, Sayed S. R.; Moustafa, Moustafa Hemeda

doi:10.1007/s12517-010-0200-8

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…This is similar to that suggested for other significant normal-faulting earthquakes on the northwestern Saudi Arabian rift flank (Pallister et al, 2010;Aldamegh et al, 2012). The 2009 Badr earthquake occurred 450 km southeast of the Tabuk earthquake and about 50 km away from the Red Sea escarpment; it was also a normal-faulting event with a similar strike parallel to the Red Sea (Aldamegh et al, 2012). Also in 2009, a rifting event took place in Harrat Lunayyir, about 300 km southsoutheast of the Tabuk earthquake and well within the rift flank.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

“…Although the fault strike and dip are not particularly well constrained by the InSAR data, the results indicate the minimum regional compressional stress σ 3 has a direction that is roughly perpendicular to the Red Sea. This is similar to that suggested for other significant normal-faulting earthquakes on the northwestern Saudi Arabian rift flank (Pallister et al, 2010;Aldamegh et al, 2012). The 2009 Badr earthquake occurred 450 km southeast of the Tabuk earthquake and about 50 km away from the Red Sea escarpment; it was also a normal-faulting event with a similar strike parallel to the Red Sea (Aldamegh et al, 2012).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 84%

“…The region is classified as being of relatively low seismic hazard (Giardini et al, 2003), and the Arabian plate is also found to be a geodetically stable region, with no detectable internal strain (ArRajehi et al, 2010). However, several significant earthquakes have occurred on the rift flank in the past two to three decades, including the 1982 M w 6.2 earthquake in Yemen (Choy and Kind, 1987), the M w 5.1 Tabuk and M w 3.7 Badr earthquakes in northwestern Saudi Arabia on 22 June 2004 and 27 August 2009, respectively (Aldamegh et al, , 2012, and the M L 5.1 event on 23 January 2014 near Jizan in southern Saudi Arabia. Historically, there have also been many damaging earthquakes in the region, both in Saudi Arabia and in Yemen (Ambraseys and Melville, 1983;Ambraseys et al, 1994).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Identifying Active Faults by Improving Earthquake Locations with InSAR Data and Bayesian Estimation: The 2004 Tabuk (Saudi Arabia) Earthquake Sequence

Xu¹,

Dutta²,

Jónsson³

2015

Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America

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A sequence of shallow earthquakes of magnitudes ≤ 5:1 took place in 2004 on the eastern flank of the Red Sea rift, near the city of Tabuk in northwestern Saudi Arabia. The earthquakes could not be well located due to the sparse distribution of seismic stations in the region, making it difficult to associate the activity with one of the many mapped faults in the area and thus to improve the assessment of seismic hazard in the region. We used Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) data from the European Space Agency's Envisat and ERS-2 satellites to improve the location and source parameters of the largest event of the sequence (M w 5.1), which occurred on 22 June 2004. The mainshock caused a small but distinct ∼2:7 cm displacement signal in the InSAR data, which reveals where the earthquake took place and shows that seismic reports mislocated it by 3-16 km. With Bayesian estimation, we modeled the InSAR data using a finite-fault model in a homogeneous elastic halfspace and found the mainshock activated a normal fault, roughly 70 km southeast of the city of Tabuk. The southwest-dipping fault has a strike that is roughly parallel to the Red Sea rift, and we estimate the centroid depth of the earthquake to be ∼3:2 km. Projection of the fault model uncertainties to the surface indicates that one of the westdipping normal faults located in the area and oriented parallel to the Red Sea is a likely source for the mainshock. The results demonstrate how InSAR can be used to improve locations of moderate-size earthquakes and thus to identify currently active faults.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 84%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Identifying Active Faults by Improving Earthquake Locations with InSAR Data and Bayesian Estimation: The 2004 Tabuk (Saudi Arabia) Earthquake Sequence

Xu¹,

Dutta²,

Jónsson³

2015

Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America

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“…Despite the presence of these internal structures, seismic activity is primarily focused along the plate boundaries (ISC, 2022). In addition, intraplate earthquakes, albeit infrequent (i.e., Tabuk 2004, Lunayyir 2009) show relation with tensional stresses associated with the opening of the Red Sea extending several tens of kilometers into the western margin of the plate (Aldamegh et al., 2012; Pallister et al., 2010; Xu et al., 2015). Furthermore, significant ground subsidence, shallow seismicity, opening cracks, and sinkholes documented in the recent years toward the center of the plate indicate response to groundwater over‐exploitation and rapid urbanization (e.g., Othman et al., 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Present‐Day Motion of the Arabian Plate

et al. 2022

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The present‐day motions in and around the Arabian plate involve a broad spectrum of tectonic processes including plate subduction, continental collision, seafloor spreading, intraplate magmatism, and continental transform faulting. Therefore, good constraints on the relative plate rates and directions, and on possible intraplate deformation, are crucial to assess the seismic hazard at the boundaries of the Arabian plate and areas within it. Here we combine GNSS‐derived velocities from 168 stations located on the Arabian plate with a regional kinematic block model to provide updated estimates of the present‐day motion and internal deformation of the plate. A single Euler pole at 50.93 ± 0.15°N, 353.91 ± 0.25°E with a rotation rate of 0.524 ± 0.001°/Ma explains well almost all the GNSS station velocities relative to the ITRF14 reference frame, confirming the large‐scale rigidity of the plate. Internal strain rates at the plate‐wide scale (∼0.4 nanostrain/yr) fall within the limits for stable plate interiors, indicating that differential motions are compensated for internally, which further supports the coherent rigid motion of the Arabian plate at present. At a smaller scale, however, we identified several areas within the plate that accommodate strain rates of up to ∼8 nanostrain/yr. Anthropogenic activity and possible subsurface magmatic activity near the western margin of the Arabian plate are likely responsible for the observed local internal deformation. Put together, our results show a remarkable level of stability for the Arabian lithosphere, which can withstand the long‐term load forces associated with active continental collision in the northeast and breakup to the southwest with minimal internal deformation.

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“…Since the earthquakes are the only witness of active deformation, the analyses of recent earthquakes recorded by the Saudi Seismic Network (SSN) will provide an understanding of the present-day stress fields that are responsible for the lithospheric deformation in the Arabian Shield. Seismic activities that are randomly distributed in the Arabian shield are presumably attributed to the stress transfer due to the relative motion between the African and Arabian shields through the divergent movements acting in the Red Sea Rifting system (Aldamegh et al , 2010. A small-sized earthquake of Mw 4.0 struck the Arabian Shield on 3rd, November 2017, 24 km from the eastern coastline of the Red Sea.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An analysis of a moderate earthquake, eastern flank of the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia

Abdelfattah

Alamri

Soliman

et al. 2020

Earth Planets Space

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The present study presents the analysis of a moderate earthquake (Mw 4.0) and its largest aftershocks located along the Red Sea coast, southwestern Saudi Arabia, with the aim to understand the enigma of peculiar seismicity in the Arabian Shield. We analyzed a high-quality waveform dataset collected from ten well-recorded earthquakes of moment magnitude ranging from 2.0 to 4.0 in order to determine the hypocenter locations and focal mechanisms. The focal mechanisms were retrieved from the regional moment-tensor inversion for the mainshock and using the P-wave polarities for the corresponding aftershocks of Mw ≥ 2.0, respectively. The focal mechanism solutions were inverted to retrieve the seismogenic stress using the stress tensor inversion. The combination of the nearby fault trends and the obtained results from hypocentral relocations, focal mechanism solutions, and stress tensor inversion emphasizes that the NE fault trend is likely to be the causative fault resulting in the 2017 Namas earthquake sequence, implying that the local tectonic setting is incompatible with the large-scale regional tectonics of the Red Sea opening. On the contrary, estimates of low-stress drops exhibit typical values compatible with those reported for the shallow plate-boundary earthquakes that occurred in the Red Sea, suggesting that the existing weak zones in the southernmost part of the Arabian Shield may be attributed to the large-scale regional tectonics of the Red Sea opening.

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Focal mechanism of Badr earthquake, Saudia Arabia of August 27, 2009

Cited by 12 publications

References 18 publications

Identifying Active Faults by Improving Earthquake Locations with InSAR Data and Bayesian Estimation: The 2004 Tabuk (Saudi Arabia) Earthquake Sequence

Identifying Active Faults by Improving Earthquake Locations with InSAR Data and Bayesian Estimation: The 2004 Tabuk (Saudi Arabia) Earthquake Sequence

Present‐Day Motion of the Arabian Plate

An analysis of a moderate earthquake, eastern flank of the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia

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