State of Tectonic Stress in Northeast India and Adjoining South Asia Region: An Appraisal

An attempt is made to map the spatial variation of the tectonic stress pattern in northeast India and its adjoining south Asia region using stress tensor inversion of some 516 fault-plane solutions. The Bhutan Himalaya and the Arunachal Himalaya are mapped with north-south to north-northwest-south-southeast compression. The eastern Himalaya syntaxis zone, on the other hand, shows a clockwise rotation; a north-northeast compression is dominant. To the south, in the intraplate part of the region, the Shillong plateau, Assam valley, Bengal basin (Bangladesh), and Tripura fold belt exhibit north-northwest to north-northeast compression. Orthogonal horizontal extension is dominant in southern Tibet, Bhutan, and partly in the syntaxis zone, and the same is also observed in the Shillong plateau and Assam valley area of the intraplate region. The Indo-Burma ranges and the Sagaing fault in the Myanmar region show a northeast-southwest compression; an orthogonal horizontal northwest-southeast extension is also observed in the Sagaing fault zone. A depth variation of the tectonic stress is observed below the Indo-Burma ranges; it changes from north-south to northeast-southwest in the southern part, and from northeast-southwest to north-northeast-south-southwest in the northern part in the deeper seismogenic zone. The stress inversion results of clusters of events in individual zones, though mostly conformable with the average observations, indicate a variation in the Shillong plateau due to heterogeneity and tectonic complexity.