Surface Ruptures of the 2022 Mw 6.7 Menyuan Earthquake Revealed by Integrated Remote Sensing

  Objectives  On 8th January 2022, a large earthquake (Mw 6.7) struck Menyuan County, Qinghai, China, causing serious damage to Lanzhou-Xinjiang high speed railway and forcing the closure of the railway for repairs, which has attracted highly domestic and international attention.

  Methods  We presented a technical framework to determine earthquake surface ruptures by integrating optical, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images as well as light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data, and evaluated its damage to traffic networks. Firstly, we acquired a range of datasets including GF-1, GF-7, Sentinel-2 optical images and Sentinel-1A SAR images. GF-1 and GF-7 images were used to determine the spatial distribution characteristic of the surface ruptures. Secondly, we employed to estimate 2D surface displacement fields using optical pixel offset technique. One in the east-west (EW) direction and the other in the south-north (SN) direction. SAR pixel offset technique was utilized to acquire surface displacements in the range and azimuth directions whilst interferometric SAR(InSAR) was mainly for surface displacements in the radar line of sight (i.e. the range direction). Structure from motion (SfM) was used to process UAV images to obtain high precision digital surface models (DSMs). Finally, all the abovementioned information was used to precisely determine the spatial distribution and surface displacement characteristics of the earthquake surface ruptures.

  Results  Our results show that the maximum surface displacement in the EW direction was about 2.0 m, the maximum in the range direction was approximately 1.5 m, and the total length of the surface ruptures was around 36.22 km. Furthermore, we performed an assessment of traffic inefficiency in Menyuan and its surrounding areas based on the distribution of historical geohazards as well as the earthquake surface ruptures using machine learning methods support vector machine models.

  Conclusions  The Menyuan earthquake had the greatest impacts on highways, and the least impacts on rural roads. The southeast sections of the major highways G0611 and G338 had high risks. The technical framework demonstrated in this paper appears to be promising to precisely map surface ruptures, which in turn will directly benefit to earthquake disaster reduction.