“…The earthquake was well recorded by modern geodetic measurements [ Galetzka et al , ; Feng et al , ], providing us with an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the variations in dip. The overall fault dip is estimated to be approximately 6–11° based on seismic and geodetic analyses [ Avouac et al , ; Diao et al , ; Hayes et al , ; Liu and Ge , ; Shan et al , ; Wang and Fialko , ; Wang et al , ; Zhang and Xu , ; Zhang et al , ; Liu et al , ], suggesting that the earthquake mainly ruptured a flat portion of the MHT. Some geodetic analyses found that a listric fault could explain the surface deformations better than a planar fault could [ Wang and Fialko , ; Elliott et al , ], implying that ruptures may have reached the shallow steep fault branches.…”