Spatiotemporal Evolution of the Decade Long Postseismic Deformation Following the October 23rd, 2011 Mw 7.1 Van (eastern Turkey) Earthquake

It has now been 10 years since the October 23rd, 2011, Mw 7.1 Van earthquake that occurred on a previously unknown blind thrust fault in the Turkish-Iranian Plateau causing over 600 fatalities and extensive damage in and around the city of Van. The coseismic slip did not reach the surface during the complex faulting event, which was composed of a north-dipping east-west trending main fault and a left-lateral tear fault that bounded the rupture to the east, a fault that continued to slip aseismically after the mainshock. To infer the spatiotemporal evolution of the postseismic deformation that took place in the region during the decade following the earthquake, we used multi-band InSAR observations accompanied with campaign-based GNSS measurements. C-band radar data were acquired in the interferometric wide swath mode of the twin Sentinel-1 satellites, which have continuously imaged the Van region with a 6-day revisit time since 2014. Both descending- and ascending-orbit Sentinel-1 data were used in our analysis. We also used an L-band radar dataset consisting of 23 WD1 ScanSAR images from a descending orbit of the Japanese ALOS-2 satellite, which encompass a time period of 6 years from 2015 to 2021. Here in this study, we present our up-to-date postseismic time-series analysis and also our recent postseismic model that uses a triangular mesh to better represent the complex geometry of the faults in the region.