The recent instrumental seismicity of Syria and its implications

Abstract

This contribution is an attempt to enlarge the current knowledge about the recent instrumental seismicity, recorded during the period 1995-2012 by the Syrian national seismological network, as well as the seismotectonic settings in Syria. The recent instrumental seismicity has shown that the earthquake activity has produced a little number of low magnitude events. Consequently, it indicates that this activity is actually passing through a relative quiescence in comparison with the historical seismicity. The correlation between the instrumental seismicity and the seismotectonic features was performed by analyzing spatial distributions of seismic events and focal mechanisms of some strongest events. The current results, allow observing many types of the seismic activity as follows: Swarm-type, Cluster-type, and Occasional-type, which could improve the understanding of the behavior of the seismically active faults. The long return periods of large earthquakes (M≥5) and the shortness of instrumental seismicity, prevent us to completely characterize the seismic activity and to discover all the active faults in the country.