Rapid afterslip and short-term viscoelastic relaxation following the 2008 M_W7.9 Wenchuan earthquake

Significant postseismic deformation of the 2008 M_W7.9 Wenchuan earthquake has been observed from GPS data of the first 14 days after the earthquake. The possible mechanisms for the rapid postseismic deformation are assumed to be afterslip on the earthquake rupture plane and viscoelastic relaxation of coseismiclly stress change in the lower crust or upper mantle. We firstly use the constrained least squares method to find an afterslip model which can fit the GPS data best. The afterslip model can explain near-field data very well but shows considerable discrepancies in fitting far-field data. To estimate the effect due to the viscoelastic relaxation in the lower crust, we then ignore the contribution from the afterslip and attempt to invert the viscosity structure beneath the Longmenshan fault where the Wenchuan earthquake occurred from the postseismic deformation data. For this purpose, we use a viscoelastic model with a 2D geometry based on the geological and seismological observations and the coseismic slip distribution derived from the coseismic GPS and InSAR data. By means of a grid search we find that the optimum viscosity is 9×10¹⁸ Pa·s for the middle-lower crust in the Chengdu Basin, 4×10¹⁷ Pa·s for the middle-lower crust in the Chuanxi Plateau and 7×10¹⁷ Pa·s for the low velocity zone in the Chuanxi plateau. The viscoelastic model explains the postseismic deformation observed in the far-field satisfactorily, but it is considerably worse than the afterslip model in fitting the near-fault data. It suggests therefore a hybrid model including both afterslip and relaxation effects. Since the viscoelastic model produces mainly the far-field surface deformation and has fewer degree of freedoms (three viscosity parameters) than the afterslip model with a huge number of source parameters, we fix the viscositiy structure as obtained before but redetermine the afterslip distribution using the residual data from the viscoelastic modeling. The redetermined afterslip distribution becomes physically more reasonable; it is more localized and exhibits a pattern spatially complementary with the coseismic rupture distribution. We conclude that the aseismic fault slip is responsible for the near-fault postseismic deformation, whereas the viscoelastic stress relaxation might be the major cause for the far-field postseismic deformation.