Determination of tectonic and nontectonic vertical motion rates of the North China Craton using dense GPS and GRACE data

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jseaes.2022.105314Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The elastic (un-)loading response to mass changes is calculated using GRACE data.

  • The average estimated tectonic uplift rate in the mountain areas is 1.37 ± 0.6 mm/yr.

  • The maximum land subsidence rate in the North China Plain is 72.0 ± 1.2 mm/yr.

  • A high-resolution water mass variation model is needed.

Abstract

Previous geodetic vertical observations show that both uplift and subsidence occur in the North China Craton. While significant land subsidence occurs in the North China Plain, uplift is observed in the surrounding mountain areas. However, previous studies neither separate the tectonic and nontectonic vertical motions nor correct for elastic response to near surface mass changes. Here, we reply on the more GPS data from 1999 to 2020 and GRACE data from 2002 to 2020 to estimate the vertical motion rates. After removing the elastic (un-)loading deformation due to near surface mass variations, we obtain the tectonic uplift rates at GPS stations built on bedrock in the mountain areas like the Shanxi Plateau and land subsidence rates mainly in the North China Plain. The tectonic rock uplift mainly occurs in the Shanxi Plateau, Yanshan Montains, Shandong Peninsula and Dabie orogen, with an average uplift rate of 1.37 ± 0.6 mm/yr, which is larger than the long-term geological uplift rate. The land subsidence mainly concentrates in the North China Plain, Shanxi Graben, and Jiangsu province with the maximum subsidence rate of 72 ± 1.2 mm/yr. The mismatch between the geodetic and geological uplift rates suggests that a high-resolution water mass loss in the North China Plain is needed.

Introduction

The North China Craton (NCC) is an important part of the Sino–Korean Craton. Owing to the combined action of the subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the East Asian continent and the collision with the Okhotsk Sea Plate in the Late Mesozoic, the NCC underwent strong intracontinental orogeny and craton destruction (Wu et al., 2008, Wu et al., 2019, Zhu et al., 2011, Dong et al., 2018). During the Cenozoic, the tectonic evolution of the NCC led to a further difference from east to west (Fig. 1). East of the Taihang Mountains, the lithosphere was strongly thinned, leading to the production of thick sedimentary layer, which shaped the geomorphic features of the present eastern North China Plain and coastal plain. West of the Taihang Mountains, crustal extension occurred in the eastern margin of the Ordos Block and formed the Shanxi rift systems (Ma and Wu, 1987, Zhu et al., 2007, Dong et al., 2018, Zhu et al., 2011, Liu et al., 2008).

Active tectonic and historical earthquake studies indicate that the NCC is a seismically active area (Fig. 1), and at least 17 M ≥ 7 earthquakes occurred in history (Ma et al., 1982, Liu et al., 2011). In the west of the Taihang Mountains, most earthquakes occurred in the Circum-Ordos seismic zones. Nineteen M ≥ 6 historic earthquakes ruptured the Shanxi graben, including two M = 8 events, the 1303 Hongdong and the 1695 Linfen earthquakes (Gu et al., 1983, Liu et al., 2007). In the North China Plain (NCP), several strong earthquakes ruptured on the NNE trending Tanlu fault and the Tangshan-Hejian-Cixian fault, including the 1668 M = 8.5 Tanlu earthquake, 1976 M = 7.8 Tangshan earthquake, 1966 M = 7.2 Xingtai earthquake (Gu et al., 1983). Owing to its specific geotectonic location, complex tectonic geomorphology, and strong intraplate seismicity, the NCC has become one of the ideal places for studying the intraplate tectonic activity (Shen et al., 2000, Deng et al., 2003, Liu et al., 2011, Zhang et al., 2013a, Zhang et al., 2013b, Wang et al., 2022). On the one hand, the crustal earthquakes are the results of the strain accumulation due to long-term tectonic loading. On the other hand, the mass loading or unloading (e.g., groundwater pumping, lake loading) may facilitate the occurrence of earthquakes in different ways (Amos et al., 2014, Brothers et al., 2011, Johnson et al., 2017).

Groundwater provides for nearly 70% of the total consumption in the NCP. Over the past decades, the groundwater overexploitations have reached ∼2.6 and 1.2 km3/year in the shallow aquifers and deep aquifers, respectively (Jiang et al., 2018). The water loss has been detected by GRACE data (e.g., Feng et al., 2013). The substantial groundwater exploitation in the NCP has resulted in large extent of land subsidence due to the aquifer system compaction (Li et al., 2020, Jiang et al., 2018). In the past two decades, different geodetic methods have been used to measure the spatial and temporal evolution of vertical land motion and water mass storge variations in the NCP, including the Global Positioning System (GPS), interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), spirit leveling, gravimetry and GRACE (e.g., Hao et al., 2016a, Hao et al., 2021, Jiang et al., 2018, Liu et al., 2018, Luo et al., 2014, Su et al., 2021, Zhao et al., 2014). The observed spatiotemporal surface land deformation is valuable to constrain the elastic and inelastic skeletal storage coefficients along with hydraulic head measurements (e.g., Bell et al., 2008, Jiang et al., 2018, Hoffmann et al., 2001, Miller et al., 2017). These two aquifer parameters are used to estimate the total water loss. Su et al. (2021) found that the land subsidence area and subsidence rate increased significantly based on leveling data spanning ∼50 years. Zhao et al. (2014) obtained the significant land subsidence of the NCP using the continuous and campaign GPS stations of the Crustal Movement Observation Network of China (CMONOC) within a time span of ∼3–7 years. They obtained a similar pattern of subsidence with that from Su et al. (2021). However, these results did not consider the elastic loading deformation caused by the mass changes. Although the influence of elastic loading deformation was considered when Pan et al., 2021, Li et al., 2020 studied the vertical motion rates in North China, the spatial resolution of the vertical motion velocity field is relatively poor because only cGPS stations were used.

Previous leveling and GPS also observed similar magnitude of uplift rate in the mountain areas surrounding the NCP. Zhao et al. (2014) documented that the uplift rate in Shanxi Plateau is 0–3 mm/yr which is comparable to leveling data (Su et al., 2021). Because the GPS or leveling derived uplift rates are usually much faster than the geological rate needed to build mountains, the elastic vertical deformation in response to mass changes in adjacent areas is invoked to explain the discrepancy between the geodetic and geological uplift rates (Amos et al., 2014, Hammond et al., 2016). Amos et al. (2014) found that the GPS observed uplift rates in Coast ranges and Sierra Nevada of central California are comparable to the prediction of elastic unloading rates due to water mass loss in the California Valley. It is still unknown whether the GPS observed uplift of the Shanxi Plateau can be explained by the elastic rebound due to water mass loss in the NCP. Another question we concern is that whether the groundwater overexploitation also affects the seismicity in the NCP as found in other places (Brothers et al., 2011, Amos et al., 2014), but this issue is beyond of the scope of this study.

In this study, we collect and process more observations from cGPS and campaign GPS stations of the CMONOC as well as cGPS from China Meteorological Administration (CMA) to obtain raw position time series. Then, we estimate the seasonal deformation and long-term elastic vertical deformation in response to seasonal and long-term mass variations using GRACE satellite data, respectively. We finally obtain the tectonic rock uplift rates in the mountain areas and nontectonic land subsidence rates in the NCP by removing the elastic deformation in response to mass variations, based on the basal conditions of the GPS stations.

Section snippets

GPS data and processing

We gather and process cGPS and campaign stations of the CMONOC as well as cGPS stations from CMA. The CMONOC consists of 75 cGPS stations in the study area, most of which were installed on bedrock (bedrock station) except for 9 stations buried in sedimentary units (soil station), NMWT, XIAA, TJWQ, TJBH, TJBD, NMTK, JSYC, SHAO and ZJJD. Among these cGPS stations, 8 stations have been recording data since 1999, and the other 69 stations have been recording observations since ∼2010. There are 746

Vertical elastic (un-)loading deformation

The GRACE/GFO data from 2002 to 2020 are analyzed to estimate the vertical elastic (un-)loading deformation time series and equivalent water heights (EWH) at GPS stations caused by mass changes based on the equations of Wahr et al. (1998). To be consistent with the GPS measurements of surface loading, the CSR-provided de-aliasing Level-1B (AOD1B) solution of atmospheric and oceanic model (GAC) are added to the GRACE/GFO gravity solutions (the so-called GSM solutions), which mainly contain

Elastic vertical deformation in response to near surface mass changes

Fig. 3 shows that the height time series at TAIN site derived from GPS and GRACE exhibit obvious and consistent periodic deformation, although the GPS observes larger magnitude than GRACE. In addition, the magnitude of vertical displacements in response to ocean and atmospheric variations (GAC solutions) is larger than that from water mass loading (GSM solutions) in the NCC, suggesting that the seasonal water storage variations in this region is relatively small. Fig. 4 shows the comparison of

Accuracies of the GPS vertical motion rates

We evaluate the accuracies of the GPS derived vertical motion rates using the formal uncertainties obtained from the linear fitting of height time series. For the cGPS stations both from the CMONOC and CMA, a combination of flicker and white noise is used as the noise model. We do not consider the influence of flicker noise for the height time series at campaign stations of the CMONOC, since the temporally correlated process for noise was largely reduced at these sparsely sampled observations

Conclusions

In this study, we obtain the vertical velocity field in the NCC with a high spatial resolution based on a large number of GPS stations up to now. It is the first time to measure the vertical deformation using cGPS observations from CMA, which greatly improves the spatial resolution of the land subsidence rates in the NCC. This is because most of the cGPS stations of CMA were installed in sedimentary units.

We calculate the mass changes from land water, atmospheric and nontidal ocean loading and

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Dongzhen Wang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Writing – original draft, Visualization. Bin Zhao: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – review & editing. Yu Li: Data curation, Supervision. Jiansheng Yu: Data curation, Supervision. Yi Chen: Visualization. Xiaohui Zhou: Data curation.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (No. 2021CFB504, 2021CFB508) and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42074116). The GPS data are supported by the CMONOC project, China Earthquake Networks Center, China Meteorological Administration, and GPS data were processed using the GAMIT/GLOBK package. Most of the figures were prepared using GMT mapping tools (Wessel et al., 2013).

References (65)

  • C.B. Amos et al.

    Uplift and seismicity driven by groundwater depletion in central California

    Nature

    (2014)
  • J.W. Bell et al.

    Permanent scatterer InSAR reveals seasonal and long-term aquifer-system response to groundwater pumping and artificial recharge

    Water Resour. Res.

    (2008)
  • Y. Bock et al.

    Physical applications of GPS geodesy: a review

    Reports Prog. Phys.

    (2016)
  • M.S. Bos et al.

    Fast error analysis of continuous GNSS observations with missing data

    J. Geod.

    (2013)
  • D. Brothers et al.

    Loading of the San Andreas fault by flood-induced rupture of faults beneath the Salton Sea

    Nat. Geosci.

    (2011)
  • R. Bürgmann et al.

    Resolving vertical tectonics in the San Francisco Bay Area from permanent scatterer InSAR and GPS analysis

    Geology

    (2006)
  • G. Carlson et al.

    Seasonal and Long-Term Groundwater Unloading in the Central Valley Modifies Crustal Stress

    J. Geophys. Res. Solid Earth

    (2020)
  • Q.D. Deng et al.

    Active tectonics and earthquake activities in China

    Earth Science Frontiers.

    (2003)
  • Dong, S. W., Zhang, Y. Q., Li, H., 2018. The Yanshan orogeny and Late Mesozoic multi-plate convergence in east...
  • N.P. Fay et al.

    Contemporary vertical velocity of the central Basin and Range and uplift of the southern Sierra Nevada

    Geophys. Res. Lett.

    (2008)
  • W. Feng et al.

    Evaluation of groundwater depletion in North China using the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data and ground-based measurements

    Water Resour. Res.

    (2013)
  • Gu, G. X., Lin, T. H., Shi, Z. L., Li, Q., 1983. Earthquake catalog of China: 1831 B.C.–1969 A.D. (in Chinese) 1–894....
  • Hammond, William. C., Blewitt, G., Kreemer, C., 2016. GPS imaging of vertical land motion in California and Nevada:...
  • Y.N. Fu et al.

    Seasonal and long-term vertical deformation in the Nepal Himalaya constrained by GPS and GRACE measurements

    J. Geophys. Res.

    (2012)
  • W.C. Hammond et al.

    Contemporary uplift of the Sierra Nevada, western United States, from GPS and InSAR measurements

    Geology

    (2012)
  • M. Hao et al.

    Present-day crustal vertical motion around the Ordos block constrained by precise leveling and GPS data

    Surv. Geophys.

    (2016)
  • Herring, T., King, R., McClusky, S., 2018. GLOBK Reference Manual. Global Kalman filter VLBI and GPS Analysis Program....
  • J. Hoffmann et al.

    Seasonal subsidence and rebound in Las Vegas Valley, Nevada, observed by synthetic aperture radar interferometry

    Water Resour. Res.

    (2001)
  • C.W. Johnson et al.

    Seasonal water storage, stress modulation, and California seismicity

    Science (80-.).

    (2017)
  • L. Jiang et al.

    Combining InSAR and Hydraulic Head Measurements to Estimate Aquifer Parameters and Storage Variations of Confined Aquifer System in Cangzhou, North China Plain

    Water Resour. Res.

    (2018)
  • K. Lagler et al.

    GPT2: Empirical slant delay model for radio space geodetic techniques

    Geophys. Res. Lett.

    (2013)
  • J. Langbein

    Noise in two-color electronic distance meter measurements revisited

    J. Geophys. Res.: Solid Earth

    (2004)
  • Cited by (3)

    View full text