Looking for the hidden morphological signature of active faults in a Low Strain Rate region: clues from the eastern Kachchh region (NW India)

The Kachchh region (NW India), a pericratonic rift basin delimited by E-W trending major thrust faults, is a Low Strain Rate region[PB1] . In this area, the tectonic forcing magnitude is stronger enough to trigger infrequent significant earthquakes but not enough to overprint the climatic forcing signature. As a consequence, the active faults sources of the largest seismic events are largely poorly known and their geomorphic signature is subdued. 

Instrumental and paleoseismological evidence highlights that the eastern part of Kachchh experienced a significant number of seismic events such as the 1819-06-16 Allah Bund earthquake (Mw 7.8, also known as the Rann of Kutch earthquake), the 1956-07-21 Anjar earthquake (Mw 6.1), the 2001-01-26 Bhuj earthquake (Mw 7.6) and the 2006 events (Mw 5.0 and 5.6 earthquake occurred along Island Belt Fault and Gedi fault). 

In this region, the unavailability of useful outcrop information due to a significant climatic overprinting of the fault’s morphological signatures hampers the detection and parametrization of actively deforming faults.

For this reason, in this ongoing work, we propose a multidisciplinary approach, aimed at detecting active geological structures and their related [PB2] surface deformation, which mainly consists of quantitative tectonic geomorphology and paleoseismological analyses and structural interpretation and modelling. Preliminary results are a morphotectonic evolution model and 3D fault model of the study area. Finally, we stress the concept that only a multidisciplinary approach could provide useful information to understand better the highly debated active tectonic framework of the study area.