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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Earth Sci.
Sec. Solid Earth Geophysics
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feart.2025.1533639
Mechanism of abrupt supershear rupture for the 2021 Maduo earthquake (Mw=7.4) in northern Tibetan Plateau
Provisionally accepted- National Institute of Natural Hazards, Ministry of Emergency Management (China), Beijing, China
The 2021 Maduo earthquake (Mw=7.4) is the first sudden and abrupt supershear rupture ever documented in the history of seismology, in which subshear rupture changes to supershear within a short time and short distance. However, the mechanism for this special phenomenon remains unclear, although previous workers have done much work on it. For this reason, we use the finite element method to study the effects of fault geometry near the epicenter of the earthquake on the generation of rupture scenarios, and use the grid-search approach to find the optimal model. Our simulation results show that the special fault geometry with a curved bend near the epicenter in the eastern segment of the fault induced supershear rupture transition at ~3-5 s after the rupture nucleation, leading to the abrupt and sudden occurrence of the supershear rupture in the earthquake, while the westward-going rupture is behaved subshear in general. Additionally, the modelling results suggest the coseismic slips along the fault is mainly controlled by unevenly distributed dynamic friction coefficients. The modelling results also suggest that the other complex geometry of the fault such as stepover cannot encourage the abrupt supershear rupture in the Maduo earthquake. Therefore, this work may provide a new perspective for the study of the dynamic mechanism of supershear rupture.
Keywords: fault bend, Abrupt and sudden supershear rupture, Finite Elenment Method, 2021 Maduo earthquake, grid-search approach
Received: 24 Nov 2024; Accepted: 28 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wu and Zhu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Shoubiao Zhu, National Institute of Natural Hazards, Ministry of Emergency Management (China), Beijing, China
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