Seismic interactions and related faulting revealed by moderate to large earthquakes in the SE Aegean region

Abstract

Southern Aegean and Western Turkey are mainly dominated by significant exten sional regime and crustal thinning. Segmented normal faults and horst graben systems with varying orientations characterize the region. In these types of extensional re gions, seismicity is quite diffuse and fault networks can be quite complex. Thus, it is challenging to obtain the exact distribution of active faults and understand how they interact with each other to accommodate the extension. In order to interpret the fault structures of the region and their interaction, we focused on Gökova and Kuşadası Bay earthquakes due to the existence of recent high-rate seismicity. For the fault interaction interpretations, we used multidisciplinary data set based fault geometry and fault slip models, source mechanism solutions, InSAR time series analysis. We analyzed the 2017, Mw 6.6 Bodrum − Kos earthquake aftershock progression by using InSAR time series and 3 moderate sized earthquakes that occurred in Ula, which is located on-land in the east of G¨okova Bay. Our goal is to reveal the active fault structures on eastern edge of the Gökova Bay, Ula region, by InSAR data modeling of the events, regional seismic waveform inversions and last ten years Mw ≥ 4 magnitude waveform based focal mechanism solutions. As part of this study, 2020 Mw 7.0 Samos earthquake and its aftershocks were also studied. We also applied cluster analysis to identify the changes in waveforms and obtained focal mechanism solutions for most clusters.