The Tectonic Significance of the Mw7.1 Earthquake Source Model in Tibet in 2025 Constrained by InSAR Data

On 7 January 2025, at Beijing time, an Mw7.1 earthquake occurred in Dingri County, Shigatse, Tibet. To accurately determine the fault that caused this earthquake and understand the source mechanism, this study utilized Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) technology to process Sentinel-A data, obtaining the line-of-sight (LOS) co-seismic deformation field for this earthquake. This deformation field was used as constraint data to invert the geometric parameters and slip distribution of the fault. The co-seismic deformation field indicates that the main characteristics of the earthquake-affected area are vertical deformation and east-west extension, with maximum deformation amounts of 1.6 m and 1.0 m for the ascending and descending tracks, respectively. A Bayesian method based on sequential Monte Carlo sampling was employed to invert the position and geometric parameters of the fault, and on this basis, the slip distribution was inverted using the steepest descent method. The inversion results show that the fault has a strike of 189.2°, a dip angle of 40.6°, and is classified as a westward-dipping normal fault, with a rupture length of 20 km, a maximum slip of approximately 4.6 m, and an average slip angle of about −82.81°. This indicates that the earthquake predominantly involved normal faulting with a small amount of left–lateral strike–slip, corresponding to a moment magnitude of Mw7.1, suggesting that the fault responsible for the earthquake was the northern segment of the DMCF (Deng Me Cuo Fault). The slip distribution results obtained from the finite fault model inversion show that this earthquake led to a significant increase in Coulomb stress at both ends of the fault and in the northeastern–southwestern region, with stress loading far exceeding the earthquake triggering threshold of 0.03 MPa. Through analysis, we believe that this Dingri earthquake occurred at the intersection of a “Y”-shaped structural feature where stress concentration is likely, which may be a primary reason for the frequent occurrence of moderate to strong earthquakes in this area.