Mantle rise may be the reason behind Morocco earthquake

Source: Geophysical Research Letters

On September 8, 2023, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck western Morocco, causing damage and destruction that killed thousands in rural communities in the High Atlas Mountains. Prior to the 2023 event, the last major earthquake to affect Morocco occurred in 1960, and this long period of seismic silence may have contributed to the region and its infrastructure being unprepared for major tremors and the resulting damage.

Most of Morocco’s seismic activity occurs near the Rif Mountains, north of the 2023 earthquake epicenter, which were formed by the convergence of the African and Eurasian plates. But near the High Atlas Mountains—the tallest in North Africa, with peaks rising more than 4,000 meters—the plates are converging at a rate of only about 1 millimeter per year. It is thought that the rising mantle beneath the High Atlas, rather than slow convergence, is the main reason these peaks are so high.

Examining geodetic and seismic data, Huang et al. found that the 2023 Morocco earthquake originated in the Tizi n'Test fault system on a fault plane with an epicenter about 26 kilometers below the surface and that the strongest fault impacts occurred at depths of 12–36 kilometers. The event displaced the Moho, the boundary about 32 kilometers below the surface where the crust meets the mantle.

Given the earthquake's unusually deep origin and its location far from plate boundaries, the researchers suggest the quake may have been triggered by the same mantle uplift that helps lift the High Atlas Mountains, rather than by fault activity closer to the surface.

The results suggest that seismic hazard models should include more data on the deeper dynamics in intraplate regions, which are often ignored in favor of plate boundary dynamics, the authors say. They also highlight the importance of earthquake monitoring for regions, such as this one, where slow deformation rates and complex fault structures cause rare but devastating disasters. (Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL109052, 2024)

—Rebecca Owen (@beccapox), science writer

Citation: Owen, R. (2024), Mantle uplift may have caused Morocco earthquake, EOS, 105, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EO240302. Published 18 July 2024. Text © 2024. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Reuse is prohibited without express permission of the copyright owner.

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