The 1998 Mw 5.7 Zhangbei-Shangyi (China) earthquake revisited: A buried thrust fault revealed with interferometric synthetic aperture radar

The 1998 Mw 5.7 Zhangbei‐Shangyi (China) earthquake is the largest to have occurred in northern China since the large 1976 Ms 7.8 Tangshan earthquake. Due to its proximity to Beijing, the capital of China, it has therefore gained a lot of attention. A great number of studies have been conducted using seismic and geodetic data, but few are able to identify conclusively the orientation of the primary fault plane for this earthquake. In this paper, two independent ERS synthetic aperture radar interferograms are used to determine precisely the location and magnitude of coseismic surface displacements (∼11 cm in the radar line of sight). Modeling the event as dislocation in an elastic half‐space suggests that the earthquake is associated with a buried shallow NNE‐SSW oriented thrust fault with a limited amount of lateral displacement, which is consistent with seismic intensity distribution and aftershock locations.