Mechanism of the spatial distribution and migration of the strong earthquakes in China inferred from numerical simulation

摘要

Strong earthquakes that occurred in the Chinese continent are usually characterized by grouped activity, long-distance jumping migration, and different main activity areas formed in different times. In the present study, a three-dimensional (3-D) finite element model was set up for the Chinese continent involving surface topography, major active fault zones and initial stress field to study the mechanism of the longdistance jumping migration of main active areas for the strong earthquakes that occurred in the Chinese continent. A number of numerical simulation experiments have been made by introducing the birth and death of element groups under different boundary loading configurations. Our results show that (1) in an environment where always exists an initial stress field in the Earth's crust, the areas where strong earthquakes have occurred (taken as a killed element in the model) have no longer abilities to concentrate the stress largely enough and can cause the stress adjustment by an order of MPa in a large area, which may be one of the main factors affecting the long-distance jumping migration of the follow-up strong earthquakes, and (2) it is hard to accurately predict where the follow-up strong-earthquakes will occur because it could be affected by many factors such as the loading manner, geological structure, active fault zones, initial stress field, or stress field adjustment induced by strong earthquakes, but in an active period of earthquakes, the major activity area migration of strong earthquakes may be affected largely by the boundary loading configurations. These results suggest that it is helpful to predict a trend of the strong earthquake migration by investigating various kinds of boundary loading manners and the relationship between stress field adjustment induced by strong earthquakes and the regions where the strong earthquakes occurred.