Postseismic Displacement Following the Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake Detected by Continuous GPS Observation and the Effect of Viscoelastic Relaxation Using 3D- FEM

We have studied postseismic displacement following the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of December 26, 2004 in Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries using continuous GPS observation. We will report the results of our GPS analysis from the beginning of 2001 to the end of October 2007. We have also constructed 3D-FEM to evaluate the effect of viscoelastic relaxation following the earthquake. We will also report this result. We used continuous GPS data from 6 sites operated by Chulalongkorn Univ. and Kyoto Univ. or JAMSTEC, 2 sites by Shizuoka Univ. and JAMSTEC, 3 sites by NICT in Thailand and Myanmar, 1 site by STE-Lab, Nagoya Univ., and IGS sites which are located in countries surrounding the Indian Ocean include Japan, China and Australia. Bernese 5.0 was used for the processing of 30 sec. sampling data to obtain static solutions. From our analysis, no significant motions were detected at each site until the day of the earthquake. Although postseismic displacements still have been detected at CHMI and SIS2 in northern Thailand, far from the epicenter, they seem to be decelerated. On the other hand, at SAMP and PHKT, close to the epicenter, where postseismic displacements also became smaller, but still may take a time to stop. An about 29 cm SW-ward motion was detected at PHKT from just after the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake to June 2007, which is larger than its coseismic displacement, about 26 cm. We have constructed 3D-FEM model to estimate how much viscoelastic relaxation affects postseismic displacements after the earthquake. We adopted a Maxwell viscoelastic body as well as Katagi et al. (2006), and modeled around the Andaman-Sea area using isoparametric hexahedral elements with 8 nodes (Zienkiewicz and Cheng, 1967). The Andaman-Sea is well known as a back arc basins, and its ocean floor is still spreading. Therefore, the mantle viscosity under the Sunda-plate may be smaller because of upwelling warm mantle. We are going to investigate and report the postseismic displacements with changing the value of mantle viscosity.