Neotectonics - Science topic

Dear Hanan Abdulqader Darweesh ,

The Neotectonics create suitable conditions for oil accumulations in the geographic region where Iraq is located.

I worked in hydrocarbon research for eight years, I managed to predict earthquakes:

Actually my financial and social condition does not permit to do it easily. Check out my writings, and if you like them, subscribe on my Chanel

Congratulations!

That said. the academic work summarizing ( PhD ?) is very good. You have deserved the title for it.

I have a negative criticism about one thing, but it's not your mistake, it's the fault of those who taught (with US geological concepts)you,

Regards,

Laszlo

Dear Morteza Rezaei Arefi , as you formulated your question looking for basic information on this topic, I would recommend two books that summarize the related techniques: Active Tectonics - Earthquakes, Uplift, and Landscape of E.A. Keller & N. Pinter, and Tectonic Geomorphology of D.W. Burbank and R.S. Anderson. (There has been several editions of these books.) Furthermore, you can find related papers in the bibliography of geomorphometry.org (https://geomorphometry.org/bibliography/). In a recent review of Xiong et al. (2022) there are also many related references.

I am sorry if I misunderstood your question.

Kind regards, Balázs

please send me your email id I will send one excel sheet for all analyses.

In a landslide two things matter. First, the slope along which the slide occurs and second, the material properties of the rocks that sits on that slope. Landslides occur if the slope is increased. This can be a product of active tectonics (I prefer this term over neotectonics which is used for Quaternary deformation) or contemporary deformation. For example, growth of a fault related fold builds topography and increses existing slope. Active duplexing can also be a mechanism. Inherited tectonic structures are likely to affect the material properties of the rocks on the slope. For example, if they are fractured they would have a lower strength and more likely to slide than if they are intact. Again, if a near-surface exhumed fault zone runs through the slope then the fault rocks (gouge) are much more likely to slide.

Dear Sebastian,

The informal methodological guidelines we have used to compile hazardous faults in South America may partially meet your question, particularly for putting the outcome data in a friendly formal for SHA requirements:

More info will be available late this year in an upcoming special issue of the Journ. South. Am. Earth Sc.

Best,

Carlos

Michael Issigonis Could you please focus on this question and share your ideas.

Thanks

Anomalies in geomorphic features in soft sedimentary terrain of Quaternary time can give you clue to neotectonic activities. Remote Sensing data have immense potentiality in this regards. This could be the first phase of exploration work. Dr. Malay Mukul gave a nice reply. I agree with him. Though I have no experience on hydrocarbon exploration, with very little exception in PG studies, but later I worked on identification of neotectonic signatures from soft sedimentary terrains.

Following link may help you...

I have these two articles (attached) on the subject.

Cheers!

Paul - what I believe John (and Kor and Cowell) are proposing is that there is a spatial structure in a sub-glacial sheet flood to produce the erosional forms.  This clearly assumes some stability in the flow pattern during the event to produce the en echelon forms.

The following article focuses entirely on that topic; mechanical relationship between strike-slip faults and salt diapirs. It gives examples from the Zagros Fold-and-Thrust belt, where, as Christopher Talbot mentions in his comment above, salt diapirs are interpreted to rise in pull-apart basins formed at the intersection of pre-existing thrusts and basement strike-slip faults. 

Koyi, H. A., Ghassemi, A., Hessami, Kh., and Dietl, C., 2008. The mechanical relationship between strike-slip faults and salt diapirs in the Zagros fold–thrust belt. Journal of the Geological Society of London, 165, 1031-1044.

Dear Lu-Lu: for some srange reason I haven't been able to unload the photomicrographs you attached, a message saying "Netwok error" appears all the time. Perhaps the file is too heavy (21 MB) and doesn't come through. Any way, pyroxenes, both ortho and clino, are silica saturated minerals, so they should be stable in a granitic melt, unlike olivine, for example. The possibility that these minerals could be restites is also quite likely, I've found similar examples in Venezuelan and Colombian granitoid rocks. But eclogites don't contain orthopyroxene, only granulites, so the source rock of the magma should have been granulites, not eclogites. Regards. Sebastian. 

P.D.: try to send the pictures one by one, and not as an attached, and heavy, file...

You are refering to the Chaerhan salt glacier if I am right.

The Chaerhan salt glacier (namakiers) is the largest surface salt flow in Kuqa depression which is remolded from a pre-existing salt diapir (Zhao and Wang, 2016, evidence of early passive diapirism and tectonic evolution in the western Kuqa depression; Tang, 2011, Doctoral thesis). In the field, components of the paleocene rock salt is completely recrystallized, dissovled and mixed up. The chemical measuring of field samples is hard to achieve certain aims, I'm afraid. However, I'm very willing to know a possible way to unravel the kinematics of a salt structure from surface samples.

Below could be some possible aims for your research:

a. Despite the common understanding of a passive early history, some researchers still suggest that the Quele salt nappe (from which the Chaerhan namaskier is fed) is formed during the Pliocene shortening of Kuqa depression, without an early stage;

b. What is the burial depth of present surface samples? Could we establish a satisfying equation between surface samples and deep source in lab? This could led to a new way to understand a few structural quenstions, such as the shortening rate (could be calculated from the burial depth), the early history (when is the salt extruded?)

Ps: the recent surface study by Cindy Colón et al., 2016 (The variety of subaerial active salt deformations in the Kuqa fold-thrust belt (China) constrained by InSAR) could be helpful if you wanna do some remote sensing work.

Best Regards

Absolutely yes! There are many papers, that you can find in any data base, considering the effect of topography. Notwithstanding, many attenuation laws are based only on Magnitude, ditance to the fault, and type of ground at the site.

Cretaceous was the time will several events  New opening, collisions, LIPs, Polarity change, super plumes. Just to correlate deformation in Europe and spreading of Atlantic is not true. One need to understand underlaying dynamics that may have controlled both events at different geographic locations. Possibly the deformation and spreading is response to some super events which needs to be accessed

If the site is on delta or flat topography , reason could be other than neotectonics; if site is within mountain, search for other evidence to pin point the tectonic element.

Another publication indicating noetectonics of the boredr of the west frican craton:

Geol. Mag. 151 (5), 2014, pp. 885–898. c Cambridge University Press 2013 885

doi:10.1017/S0016756813000939

Vertical movements along the northern border of the West African

Craton: the Reguibat Shield and adjacent basins

R. LEPRÊTRE∗†, J. BARBARAND∗, Y. MISSENARD∗, F. LEPARMENTIER‡

& D. FRIZON DE LAMOTTE‡§

∗

Université Paris-Sud, UMR UPS-CNRS 8148 IDES, F- 91405 Orsay, France

‡TOTAL EP, Projets Nouveaux, place Jean Millier, F92 400 Paris-La Défense, France

§Département Géosciences et Environnement, Université de Cergy-Pontoise, Cergy-Pontoise, France

best regards

Marcos,

one valid criterion, in the lack of clear kinematic indicators, is to look for possible pre-faulting/fracturing features that could be used as markers. In the case of a strike-slip fault, the marker appears truncated, offset and displaced.In the case of a large fracture, the marker is truncated, but not offset and displaced. I hope this could be a simple criterion to answer your question.

Best wishes,

Enrico

The SRF is not intended for conditions with mining-induced stress change. It has not been developed or tested for such conditions.  Thus, if nearby tunnelling significantly affects the behaviour of a tunnel. Q and SRF are not directly applicable. As a general statement it can be said that it must be higher but no guidance is available on how much higher.

Numerical modelling may assist in understanding the related stress path which then can be used to asses whether Q is or is not applicable.

If you kave karsts in this area, caves are very good natural recorders for active faulting.

Nabajit, let me assume that the river dynamics you are studying is located in the North bank of the upper reach of the Brahmaputra valley. As you are interested in correlating microseismic events with the river dynamics, you must have collected seismic data set say for the last twenty years or so from the NEIST, Jorhat. Assuming you have also collected satellite imageries( twenty/ten sets say, which might be a bit cost prohibitive but perhaps you have managed it) for different years. It is not difficult to isolate most change prone patches by measuring plano-temporal variations in the GIS based environment. Next, you may start drawing concentric circles around those patches and plot the epicenters of earthquakes having different magnitudes. Subsequently, you can go for a statistical correlation. But keep in mind certain other issues. The influence of the Himalayan Frontal Thrusts in the valley (in the form of blind faults, the leading edges etc.) are still not properly mapped (Both the OIL and ONGCL have done some work but published literature are very scarce). Secondly, many smaller faults are associated with some of the major faults. As most of the north bank tributaries of the Brahmaputra carry lots of sediments, the gradual migration of banks is a general sedimentology related issue. Thus, sedimentology plays a dampening effect on tectonic changes. Perhaps frequency filtering technique might help to separate these two things.

Lot of things can be learned even from small earthquakes, From getting first ideas on scaling laws (earthquake energy and size of fault), to effects of wave propagation. All this information can be exploited for modeling larger earthquakes, which may have occured in the past. Indeed, being strong events rare and therefore lacking of instrumental data, seismologists often have to extrapolate somehow from smaller earthquakes (with all the caveats implied). As Jose said, valuable seismotectonic information can be obained, both from fault plane solutions, moment tensor inversion but also from the distribution of the seismicity, which may delineate tectonic structure. Many papers have been published on high-precision location with astonishingly high resolution of the fault geometries.

I think there are numerous studies from the field of structural geology documenting and discussing the fractal dimension in natural systems, especially for the formation and growth of normal faults in extension regimes.