RUSSIAN JOURNAL OF EARTH SCIENCES VOL. 10, ES5002, doi:10.2205/2008ES000303, 2008
[2] Since last 20 years, the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WIHG), Dehradun, India has been supporting the multidisciplinary research in exploring the structure and history of the Himalaya based on seismotectonic investigations. The institute has collected a complementary dataset of geophysical time series at different locations in Northern India (26o-34o N and 74o-82o E) containing the information of seismology, tectonics deformation. The Himalaya region has many thrust faults capable of producing the earthquakes of magnitude 8.0 or greater. Some of these faults are very prominent and visible at the surface but some faults are hidden. These faults are mostly concentrated in the mountain region producing hundreds of earthquakes every year though most are too small to detect. Recently an earthquake of M=7.6 occurred at Muzzfrabad on 8 October 2005 at northwest boundary of present study region [Rao et al., 2006].
[3] Himalaya, the arcuate mountain belt of complex geotectonic setup stretching about 2400 km
long in east-west direction with variable width of 230 to 320 km is formed due to the convergent
movement of two plates of the earth's lithosphere. The Indian and Asian continental plates
collided some 50 m.y. ago [Le Fort, 1975] resulting lithosphere deformation and modification of
the seismotectonic model of the region with the span of time. The seismotectonic investigations
have been done by many authors [Seeber and Armbruster, 1981; Ni and Barazangi, 1984;
Thakur and Kumar, 2002; Kayal, 2007;
Bollinger et al., 2007; Kumar et al., 2008, (in press)] and for the region of
NW Himalaya; we have well documented information of great ( M 8.0 ) seismic events since
1551 and geotectonic information of last two centuries. To understand the ongoing deformation
pattern of Himalaya, Seeber and Arnbruster [1981] proposed a steady state tectonic model while
Ni and Barazangi [1984] formulated an evolutionary model. These models have highlighted the
seismogenic discontinuities as MBT, MCT, a plane of detachment (MBT and MCT coincide
with this plane at depth) and the Basement thrust. Most of the seismicity lies between MBT and
MCT and steady state model states that both these thrusts are active but MCT is evaluated as
inactive in the evolutionary model.
[4] This work addresses the results on development of geoinformation technology oriented to seismotectonic problem domain [Gitis and Ermakov, 2004] and application of the technology to spatial analysis of seismicity in North India region.
[5] Web-GIS GeoProcessor 1.5 [Gitis et al., 1998; Gitis, 2004]
and GIS SeismoTide [Yurkov and Gitis, 2005] were used. Further we will consider the
initial data and geoinformation tools, after
then we present three main results of data exploration: spatial patterns of main seismic
parameters, some relationships between seismicity and components of tidal force, and spatial
analysis of relationship between strong earthquakes with
M 6.0 and digital elevation model.
Citation: 2008), Analysis of seismicity in North India, Russ. J. Earth Sci., 10, ES5002, doi:10.2205/2008ES000303.
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