Coulomb stress transfer from the 2025 M_W 7.7 Myanmar earthquake to active faults in southwestern Yunnan, China: Implications for seismic hazard

Abstract

On 28 March 2025, a strong M_W 7.7 earthquake struck the seismic gap in the central section of the Sagaing Fault in Myanmar, causing significant damages and casualties in Myanmar and neighboring countries. Major earthquakes like this are expected to transfer stresses to nearby active regions and change their seismic hazards in the near future. In this study, based on a stratified viscoelastic model and a coseismic slip model, we calculated the co- and post-seismic Coulomb stress change (△CFS) imparted by the M_W 7.7 Myanmar earthquake to the main active faults in the adjacent southwestern Yunnan region in China. Our results show that five fault segments experience up to 3 kPa of coseismic stress increase, including the Longling-Lancang Fault, the Nantinghe Fault, the Menglian Fault, the Heihe Fault, and the Red River Fault, respectively. The pattern of postseismic △CFS is similar to that of coseismic △CFS, suggesting that with the increasing elapsed time, the stress level continues to increase in these fault zones. The coseismic auxiliary stress fields show that the orientation of the principal tensile stress is predominantly NE-SW in the northern part of the southwestern Yunnan region, and shows clockwise rotation to NW-SE in the south. This stress regime controls the additional slip motion, consistent with that reflected by the coseismic shear stress change. Combined with other geophysical and geodetic data, we propose that more attention should be paid to the Longling-Lancang Fault, the Nantinghe Fault, the Menglian Fault, and the Heihe Fault, potential candidates for the next strong earthquakes in this region.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yujiang Li: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Software, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Cheng Yang: Data curation. Xingping Hu: Writing - original draft, Formal analysis. Jie Yuan: Visualization, Investigation. Rui Yao: Investigation, Data curation. Hong Li: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Supervision.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Author agreement and Acknowledgment

We appreciate the Chief Editor Zhigang Peng and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions to improve our manuscript. This work was supported by the Deep Earth Probe and Mineral Resources Exploration-National Science and Technology Major Project (2024ZD1000703), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42274138, U23A2029, 41874116). Figures were plotted using the Generic Mapping Tools (Wessel et al., 2013).

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