When continents collide, there are far-reaching consequences.  A magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck eastern Myanmar, near the border with Thailand and Laos, at a depth of 10 km, at 20:25 local time (13:55 UTC) on Thursday, March 24th, 2011.  As of Sunday, March 27, the death toll had reached 104.  There is no evidence that this earthquake is related to recent earthquakes in Japan.  Rather, the earthquake in Myanmar occurred on an active fault that is part of a broad zone of deformation resulting from the collision of the Indian subcontinent with the Eurasian landmass.

The most dramatic manifestations of the collision of India with Asia are the Himalaya, the tallest mountain range in the world, and the Tibetan Plateau, the tallest and largest plateau in the world.  However, the effects don't stop there; this collision has been forcing blocks of the Eurasian landmass toward the east-southeast for over 35 million years.  Thus active earthquake faults riddle not only the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau, but also regions far to the north and east, toward Mongolia and Beijing, and also to the southeast, through Sichuan and Yunnan into Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1.  Map of the regional tectonic setting of the March 24th Tarlay (Myanmar) earthquake (Figure modified from Tapponnier and others, 1982).  The red dot within the white square shows the location of the earthquake.  The white square outlines the area shown in Figure 3.

Figure 2.  Animation showing the tectonic evolution of India and Asia over the past 50 million years.  (Produced in 2002 by Prof. Paul Tapponnier and a team from the French Centre National de la Recherch Scientifique for the exhibition "Himalaya-Tibet: Le Choc de Continent" at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.  Based on the work published in Replumaz and Tapponnier, 2003.)

Zooming closer in to eastern Myanmar and northern Thailand and Laos, we find the crust* of the Earth behaving a bit like a stack of books that is toppling over on a shelf (Figures 3, 4, and 5).   Unlike subduction zones where one plate dives under another, in this region the rocks on either side of the earthquake faults are sliding side-to-side as India continues is northward voyage.  Side-to-side motion along two major earthquake faults, the Sagaing Fault in Myanmar and the Red River fault in Vietnam and Yunnan (Figure 1), is accomodating both of the northward motion of India and the southeasterly motion of China.  In between these two major faults, the Earth's crust is broken into a series of blocks that are slowly rotating clockwise as a result.  The edges of the blocks themselves are faults; it appears that the March 24th earthquake occurred on one of these faults, the Nan Ma fault (as mapped by Le Dain and others, 1984, and Lacassin and others, 1998; Figure 4).  

Figure 3.  (Click the image for a higher-resolution version.)  Location map of Tarlay (Myanmar) earthquake of March 24th.  The northward motion of India, shown as the largest white arrow at about 40 millimetres per year, is causing motion on the Sagaing and Red River Faults (this relative motion is shown by the smaller white arrows).  The motion on these major faults is driving motion on a series of faults in between, including the Nan Ma fault where the earthquake occurred.  An analogy of this fault motion is shown in Figure 5.  The white square indicates the area shown in Figure 4.  Figure modified from Tapponnier and others (2001).

Figure 4.  (Click the image for a higher-resolution version).  Map of the local tectonic setting of the March 24th Mong Hpayak (Myanmar) earthquake.  The earthquake epicentre is shown by the red star; the portion of the Nam Ma fault that is likely to have slipped in the earthquake is shown by the red line.  The two white arrows show where the Mekong River has been offset (shifted) by 12 km over the past few million years by motion on the Nan Ma Fault.  The areas shaded in yellow are extensional sedimentary basins.

Figure 5.  Analogy of the style of deformation in the region around the March 24th Tarlay (Myanmar) earthquake. Motion along the major Sagaing and Red River faults has caused the crust in between to deform as rotating blocks, as when a row of books topples over to the side on a shelf.  A series of left-lateral faults slip in between the blocks; the Nan Ma Fault is one of these faults.  This mechanism is aptly called "bookshelf faulting."  For reference, the Sagaing Fault runs roughly north-south.

Figure 6: Left lateral offset of paddy boundaries caused by slippage of the Nam Ma fault during the earthquake of March 24th. Photo courtesy of Soe Thura Tun of the Myanmar Earthquake Committee.

* It is actually the lithosphere of the Earth that is involved in fault and plate motions, which includes the crust and the very uppermost part of the mantle.  We use the term "crust" in this article because it is more widely understood.

References:

Lacassin, R., Replumaz, A., Leloup, P. H., 1998, Hairpin river loops and slip-sense inversion on southeast Asian strike-slip faults, Geology, 26, 703.

Le Dain, A. Y., Tapponier, P., and Molnar, P., 1984, Active faults and tectonics of Burma and surrounding regions, Journal of Geophysical Research, 89, 453.

Replumaz A. and P. Tapponnier, Reconstruction of the deformed Collision Zone between India and Asia by backward Motion of Lithospheric Blocks, Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 108, N°B6, 2285, 2003.

Tapponnier, P., Peltzer, G., Le Dain, A. Y., Armijo, R., and Cobbold, P., 1982, Propagating extrusion tectonics in Asia:  New insights from simple experiments with plasticine, Geology, 10, 611.

Tapponnier P. , Xu Zhiqin, F. Roger, B. Meyer, N. Arnaud, G. Wittlinger, Yang Jingsui, Oblique, Stepwise Rise and Growth of the Tibet Plateau, Science, vol 294, pp. 1671-1677, 2001

Contributors:

Text:  Jamie McCaughey, Prof. Paul Tapponnier

Figures: Yves Descatoire (Fig. 3 and 4), Liow Hon Sang (Fig. 5), Prof. Paul Tapponnier, Soe Thura Tun of the Myanmar Earthquake Committee (Fig. 6)

[This article published 25-March-2011, 10:51 UTC; updated 28-March-2011]