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High normal stress promoted supershear rupture during the 2023 Mw 7.8 Kahramanmaraş earthquake

Nature Geoscience (2026)Cite this article

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Abstract

On 6 February 2023, two major earthquakes with moment magnitude (Mw) of 7.8 and 7.6 ruptured multiple segments of the Eastern Anatolian Fault system, resulting in many casualties and extensive property damage in Turkey and Syria. The Mw 7.8 earthquake involved bilateral rupture along the Eastern Anatolian Fault, with at least partially supershear rupture towards the northeast and subshear rupture towards the southwest. The cause of this difference in rupture speed remains debated. Here we present evidence from seismic tomographic imaging linking this difference to structural and stress variations along the fault. Specifically, a low-velocity anomaly and a fault-parallel fast velocity direction of anisotropy in the southwest Amanos–Pazarcık segment suggest fluid infiltration, which could facilitate fault creep and reduce the stress loading rate. By contrast, the Erkenek segment to the northeast is associated with a high-velocity anomaly and fault-normal fast velocity direction, suggesting limited fluid infiltration and increased stress accumulation. Hence, we propose that the contrast in stress accumulation explains the discrepancy in rupture speeds in this earthquake and that fault structure in addition to stress loading may influence stress accumulation and thus whether a fault ruptures at supershear speeds.

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Fig. 1: Overview map of the EAF system.
Fig. 2: The spatial distribution of earthquakes and seismic stations within the study region.
Fig. 3: Horizontal sections of the imaging results.
Fig. 4: Cartoon illustrating the structure of the Mw 7.8 earthquake rupture zone.

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Data availability

The travel time catalogue was downloaded from the International Seismological Center65 at https://www.isc.ac.uk/. The final anisotropic velocity model and the relocated catalogue can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.21979/N9/EANWVE.

Code availability

The seismic tomographic inversion was performed using the open-source package TomoATT73 available at https://tomoatt.com/.

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Acknowledgements

This research was sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its MOE AcRF Tier-2 grants (MOE-T2EP20124-0003, MOE-T2EP20122-0008, MOE-T2EP50124-0011 to P.T.) and partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its MOE AcRF Tier 3 grant (MOE-MOET32021-0002 to P.T.), ‘Integrating Volcano and Earthquake Science and Technology (InVEST)’. This research was also supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2023YFF0803202 to H.Y.), Hong Kong Research Grant Council grants (14308523, 14306122 to H.Y.) and the Faculty of Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Mathematical Sciences, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Jing Chen, Mijian Xu, Yiming Bai, Xiao Xiao, Shijie Hao, Masaru Nagaso & Ping Tong

  2. State Key Laboratory of Geological Processes and Mineral Resources, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, China

    Shucheng Wu

  3. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Hongfeng Yang

  4. Earth Observatory of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Ping Tong

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Contributions

P.T. and J.C. conceived the study. M.N., J.C., M.X., S.H. and P.T. developed the adjoint-state travel time tomography code. J.C. processed the data, performed the tomography and drafted the manuscript. J.C. and Y.B. prepared the figures. All authors discussed the results and contributed to its revision.

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Correspondence to Ping Tong.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Thomas Ulrich and Metin Kahraman for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editors: Tamara Goldin and Stefan Lachowycz, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Horizontal map of the earthquake distribution near the Eastern Anatolian Fault.

a, Earthquakes with magnitude greater than 2.5 around the rupture zone during the period 2007-2019 are shown as circles19. The Amanos, Pazarcık, and Erkenek segments are highlighted by thick magenta, blue, and purple lines, respectively. Fault slip rates of the different segments are indicated21. b, Histogram of the earthquake count along the rupture zone. Basemap in a generated with Generic Mapping Tools64.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Earthquake distribution near the Eastern Anatolian Fault.

The earthquake data are from ref. 19, spanning the period 2007-2019. Earthquakes with magnitude greater than 2.5 are shown as color-coded cubes, while those with magnitude smaller than 2.5 are plotted as small black cubes. Basemap generated with Generic Mapping Tools64.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Dilatation rate map and focal mechanisms of moderate earthquakes near the Eastern Anatolian Fault.

a, The dilatation rate obtained from a joint inversion of GNSS and InSAR data20 is depicted. Dilatational strain rates (positive values) are shown in red, while compressional strain rates (negative values) are shown in blue. The Amanos, Pazarcık, and Erkenek segments of EAF are highlighted by thick magenta, blue, and purple lines, respectively. Earthquakes19 with magnitudes greater than 3.7 and occurring within 25 km of these segments are denoted by black dots. Their moment tensor solutions are also shown and color-coded based on the type of faulting determined by the FMC package74,75. N, N-SS, SS-N in red: normal, normal with strike-slip component, strike-slip with normal component; R, R-SS, SS-R in blue: reverse, reverse with strike-slip component, strike-slip with reverse component, and SS in black: strike-slip. b, The classification of the focal mechanism is presented75. Circles labeled with their IDs correspond to the moment tensor solutions depicted in (a). Basemap in a generated with Generic Mapping Tools64.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Map of surface heat flow44.

Red curves represent the -2% contour of velocity perturbation at 15 km depth. Within the northeast Amanos (magenta line) and Pazarcık segments (blue line), the low-velocity anomaly labeled as L3 corresponds to high heat flow exceeding \(80\,{\rm{mW}}/{{\rm{m}}}^{2}\) (within blue curves). Basemap generated with Generic Mapping Tools64.

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Chen, J., Xu, M., Bai, Y. et al. High normal stress promoted supershear rupture during the 2023 Mw 7.8 Kahramanmaraş earthquake. Nat. Geosci. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-025-01893-z

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