17 March, 2017
"Which fault segments ruptured in the Wenchuan earthquake and which did not? New evidence from near-fault 3D displacements derived from SAR image offsets" is the title of a new paper just published in Bulletin of Seismological Society of America (BSSA) by Guancai Feng, Sigurjón Jónsson, and Yann Klinger. In this paper we studied SAR data of the 2008 Mw7.9 Wenchuan earthquake in China and first report on efforts of cleaning the coseismic deformation observations of strong ionospheric disturbances resulting in more accurate and complete coseismic deformation field of the earthquake than have been reported before. We then use these clean data to produce near-fault SAR image offsets and invert for 3D displacements close to the fault, which clearly show which fault segments were activated in the earthquake and how much they moved. We compared these results to observations made in the field and discuss various discrepancies.