Spatio-temporal monitoring of surface deformation of the North Anatolian Fault Zone in Düzce Region by InSAR technique

The North Anatolian Fault Zone (NAFZ), that represents a transform plate boundary between the Anatolian and Eurasian plates, generated several devastating earthquakes in the 20th century. The well-known seismic sequence along the NAFZ has begun with the 1939 M7.9 Erzincan Earthquake and followed a westward migrating pattern until the 1999 M>7 Izmit-Düzce ruptures. Although there have been extensive efforts on modeling co-seismic slip properties of the recent large events along the NAFZ, possible interplay of crustal properties with fault mechanics and inter-seismic loading parameters characterized by surface deformation behavior is less known. This study aims to determine the spatio-temporal behavior of long-term surface deformation along the Düzce Fault segment of the NAFZ. We examine the effect of physical properties of the crustal structure on the inter-seismic loading and surface creep parameters in this actively deforming area. For this purpose, we adopted the well-known InSAR timeseries method using publicly available Sentinel-1 data. Sentinel-1 observations covering our study area has a time span of 8 years between 2014 and 2022. We exploit geoelectrical properties and other available seismological observations/models of the crust to be evaluated with the velocity fields inferred from InSAR time series analysis. We further compare variations in the surface deformation prior to and after the most recent November 23^rd, 2022, Mw6.0 Gölyaka-Düzce earthquake by using data obtained from the analysis of both ascending and descending InSAR datasets. Our preliminary results show the slip rate of ~25 mm/yr on the Duzce Fault.

This project is funded by the Bogazici University with the BAP Project No SUP-18161.