Coseismic Slip Distribution and Coulomb Stress Changes of the 2024 Mw 7.0 Wushi Earthquake, Xinjiang, China

On 23 January 2024, the Mw 7.0 Wushi earthquake occurred along the Maidan Fault at the boundary between the southwestern Tianshan Mountains and the Tarim Basin. This event, together with its subsequent aftershocks, provides a valuable opportunity to investigate fault rupture, stress perturbation, and aftershock triggering within a continental fold-and-thrust belt. In this study, we inverted the coseismic slip distribution by jointly integrating Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar and Pixel Offset Tracking observations. The preferred fault geometry indicates a northwest-dipping fault with a dip of approximately 60°. The mean rake angle is about 46°, suggesting an oblique slip with both thrust and left-lateral components. The 2024 Wushi event, together with the 1902 Atushi M 8.2 earthquake, produced pronounced Coulomb stress changes on the surrounding faults, with positive stress increases exceeding 10 kPa. Combined with the GNSS-derived regional strain-rate field and the interseismic fault-locking model, these results indicate elevated seismic potential on several surrounding fault segments, including portions of the Maidan Fault, Nalati Fault, North Wensu Fault, and Kalpintag Fault. We further examine the 2024 shallow Mw 5.7 aftershock, whose southeast-dipping surface rupture, together with the northwest-dipping mainshock fault, defines a typical pop-up structure. We also discuss the possible triggering of the 2025 Mw 5.8 Aheqi event by the stress perturbation associated with the Wushi mainshock. Our results highlight that the 2024 Wushi event substantially modified the regional stress field and influenced subsequent seismic activity, providing new insights into rupture segmentation, fault interaction, and seismic hazard in southwestern Tianshan.