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Palaeoseismic behaviour of strike-slip faults in slowly deforming regions: palaeoearthquakes and long-term slip history of the Ovacık Fault (eastern Turkey)

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Abstract

The Ovacık Fault (OF) is one of the internal structures of the Anatolian Block, located close to its eastern boundary. Although it shows a very clear surface trace, there are no instrumentally recorded surface rupturing earthquakes on this fault. This study concludes results of the first palaeoseismological trench study on the OF with the evidence for three surface rupturing earthquakes for the last 6 kyr. Structural, stratigraphical and geochronological constraints show that the oldest event happened between 4700 and 3022 BCE, whereas the penultimate event was between 2262 and 1643 BCE. The youngest event happened after 56 BCE, which we could only delimit from below because of the absence of any dateable material from the upper layers of the relevant horizons. The derived mean interevent time of these three palaeoevents is 2400 ± 765 years. We could not correlate any of these palaeoevents with historical earthquakes due to the absence of records in catalogues for the region of interest. Moreover, we used cumulative offsets of the major drainages to calculate the long-term slip rate of 2.7 mm/year since the Pliocene, which exceeds slip rates of other internal faults of Anatolia almost by the factor of two. Our results do not only show significant deformation for the internal parts of Anatolia but also point out a seismic potential of the OF.

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Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the governorship of the city of Malatya and Erzincan and the chiefs of the Yeşilyurt, Kemaliye, Ocak and Arapgir villages for their support during the field studies and trenching. The fruitful critics of Dr. Mariano Garcia-Fernandez, Dr. Jeremy Rimando and an anonymous reviewer significantly increased the quality of our study. We are also indebted to A. M. Celâl Şengör who read the final version of this paper and contributed with his invaluable comments. Some of our figures are generated by using the generic mapping tools (Wessel et al. 2013).

Funding

This study was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) with grant number 114Y227 and by the Istanbul Technical University with grant number BAP MYL-2017-40833.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, Ayazağa Yerleşkesi, Maden Fakültesi, Jeoloji Muhendisligi, 34469, Maslak, İstanbul, Turkey

    Müge Yazıcı, Cengiz Zabcı, Boris A. Natal’in & H. Serdar Akyüz

  2. Munzur Üniversitesi Aktuluk Yerleşkesi, Coğrafya Bölümü, 62000, Tunceli, Turkey

    Taylan Sançar

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  1. Müge Yazıcı
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  4. Taylan Sançar
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  5. H. Serdar Akyüz
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Correspondence to Müge Yazıcı.

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Highlights

- We suggest that the OF is active and may generate a surface rupturing earthquake.

- The mean earthquake interevent time of the OF is 2400 ± 765 years.

- The slip rate estimate from cumulative offset of rivers is ~ 2.7 mm/year for the OF.

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Yazıcı, M., Zabcı, C., Natal’in, B.A. et al. Palaeoseismic behaviour of strike-slip faults in slowly deforming regions: palaeoearthquakes and long-term slip history of the Ovacık Fault (eastern Turkey). J Seismol 25, 255–272 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10950-020-09964-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10950-020-09964-x

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