Iterative joint inversion of in-situ stress state along Simeulue-Nias Island

In-situ stress inversion from focal mechanisms requires knowledge of which of the two nodal planes is the fault. This is challenging, in particular, because of the inherent ambiguity of focal mechanisms the fault and the auxiliary nodal plane could not be distinguished. A relatively new inversion technique for estimating both stress and fault plane is developed by Vavryĉuk in 2014. The fault orientations are determined by applying the fault instability constraint, and the stress is calculated in iterations. In this study, this method is applied to a high-density earthquake regions, Simeulue-Batu Island. This area is interesting to be investigated because of the occurrence of the two large earthquakes, i.e. Aceh 2004 and Nias 2005 earthquake. The inversion was done based on 343 focal mechanisms data with Magnitude ≥5.5 Mw between 25^th Mei 1977- 25^th August 2015 from Harvard and Global Centroid Moment Tensor (GCMT) catalog. The area is divided into some grids, in which the analysis of stress orientation variation and its shape ratio is done for each grid. Stress inversion results show that there are three segments along Simeulue-Batu Island based on the variation of orientation stress σ₁. The stress characteristics of each segments are discussed, i.e. shape ratio, principal stress orientation and subduction angle. Interestingly, the highest value of shape ratio is 0.93 and its association with the large earthquake Aceh 2004. This suggest that the zonation obtained in this study could also be used as a proxy for the hazard map.