GPS Velocities and Structure Across the Burma Accretionary Prism and Shillong Anticline in Bangladesh

We installed a suite of 25 GPS receivers between 2003 and 2012 covering the deltaic country of Bangladesh, which lies near the junction of the Indian Shield, the Himayalan collision belt and the Indo-Burman Wedge. The crust of the Indian Shield thins southeastward in the Bengal Basin across the hinge zone of an Early Cretaceous continental margin. The thin continental and/or oceanic crust of the Bengal Basin beyond the hinge zone is overlain by the southward prograding Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta (GBD) creating a total sediment thickness of ≥16 km. This heavily-sedimented basin is being overthrust from the north by the Shillong Massif, a 2-km high basement-cored anticlinorium exposing Indian Shield, and from the east by the accretionary prism of the Indo-Burma Wedge. The soft, oblique collision of Burma with the Bengal Basin and Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta (GBD) has built a large accretionary prism that widens northwards to 250-300 km. The prism reaches as much as half way across the deep Bengal Basin. The outer folds and the thrust front are blind and buried by the rapid sedimentation of the GBD. The GPS data in Bangladesh cover the frontal region of this unusual subaerial accretionary prism, while observations from India and Myanmar provide velocities for more internal parts of the system. The convergence across this belt is oblique and partitioned. The velocity gradients across the accretionary prism indicate E-W shortening at ~13 mm/y and N-S dextral shear at ~25 mm/y. The shortening appears to be more concentrated farther west, towards the thrust front, while the shear is more distributed and does not extend to the frontal folds. How this motion is further partitioned into elastic earthquake-cycle loading and permanent inelastic deformation remains unclear. The north-dipping Dauki thrust fault raises the Shillong Massif lowers the rapidly subsiding Surma Basin foredeep. This crustal scale convergent boundary could represent the beginning of a forward jump of the Himalayan front. The surface expression of this boundary is the steep front limb of the south-verging Shillong anticline with secondary folding of the syn-tectonic Quaternary sediment of its foredeep. This suggests that the Dauki Fault is blind and extends well south of the topographic break. In support of this conclusion, receiver function analysis images a NNE-dipping velocity inversion corresponding to basement overthrusting sediment at ~6 km depth just south of the Plateau. Our GPS data, in combination with velocity data from northeast India suggests ~7 mm/y of shortening across the Dauki Fault, with the velocity gradient associated with the fault concentrated within Bangladesh, south of the Shillong anticline.