Focal mechanisms and stress variations in the Caucasus and Northeast Turkey from constraints of regional waveforms

Abstract The continental collision between Arabia and Eurasia created large strike-slip faults in Turkey as well as mountains in the Caucasus and the volcanic plateau between them. In this study, we use regional waveforms of a new seismic array deployed between 2008 and 2012 to constrain the focal mechanisms and depths of small to moderate sized earthquakes occurring in the western part of the Central Caucasus and northeast Turkey. The distribution of aftershocks and the twelve focal mechanisms involved in the sequence of the 2009 earthquake in Racha are clearly a reactivation of a deeper segment of the 1991 M7 Racha rupture zone. The deeper segment is not well connected to the shallower decollement separating the basement and sedimentary basin. The earthquakes we determined in northeastern Turkey and southern Georgia are related to the strike-slip fault system. We further combined all of the reliably determined focal mechanisms over the last 30 years to investigate the current stress status of the crust in three areas: Racha in the western Greater Caucasus, Javakheti near the Lesser Caucasus and in Northeast Turkey. Our results show that the directions of maximum compressional stress consistently fall within − 2 to 14°N throughout the entire study region. This appears to be controlled by the continental collision. Nonetheless, the minimum compression switches from vertical (in the Greater Caucasus) to the east-west direction (in northeastern Turkey), due to the westward extrusion of the Anatolia block, which is driven partly by the Hellenic subduction. The transition of the stress field is close to the Javakheti volcanic plateau in the Lesser Caucasus, where the relative magnitude between the principal stresses appears to be strongly variable.