2021 Maduo earthquake
The 2021 Maduo earthquake, also known as the 5.22 earthquake struck Madoi County in Qinghai Province, China on the morning of 22 May at 02:04 local time. The earthquake had a moment magnitude and surface-wave magnitude of 7.4, according to the Global Centroid Moment Tensor (GCMT) and the China Earthquake Administration (CEA) respectively. In Qinghai, the earthquake caused no deaths but 19 people sustained minor injuries. Highway bridges, roads and walls collapsed as a result of the earthquake. According to an anonymous source, at least twenty people were killed, 300 were injured, and 13 were missing . The earthquake was the strongest in China since the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It was assigned intensity X in Machali town, Maduo County on the China seismic intensity scale, and X ("Extreme") on the Modified Mercalli intensity scale. This earthquake was preceded by another unrelated earthquake which occurred 5 hours earlier in Yunnan. Tectonic setting. Western Sichuan is situated at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau in a vast zone of complex continental deformation caused by the collision of the Indian Plate with the Eurasian Plate. As the thrusting of the Indian Plate beneath the Eurasian Plate along the Himalayas continues , the continental crust within the Eurasian Plate is actively uplifted and thickened, forming the Tibetan Plateau. As there are no active thrust structures within the plateau, compression is accommodated by strike-slip motion along large structures including the Altyn Tagh Fault, Kunlun Fault, Haiyuan Fault and Xianshuihe fault system. Left-lateral strike-slip motion squeezes the crustal blocks of the Tibetan Plateau outwards, forcing it to move eastwards. Meanwhile, the strike-slip motion also results in east-west extension of the plateau, causing normal faults to break within the thickened crust. One of these blocks is the Bayan Har block ; bounded to the east by the Longmenshan Fault, Kunlun Fault to the north, and Xianshuihe fault system in the south. Earthquake. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the earthquake occurred as a result of dominantly left-lateral strike-slip faulting with a component of normal dip-slip. It had an estimated focal depth of 10–17 km. In a matter of days after the event, expert seismologists in China confirmed that the event occurred on the Kunlunshankou–Jiangcuo Fault; a left-lateral fault located within the Bayan Har block. This fault is located approximately 70–80 km south of the  much larger Kunlun Fault. Analysis of the USGS preliminary finite fault model of the slip distribution suggest the rupture was about 180 km long and the greatest slip was at 3.3 meters. A research paper soon to be published in "Science Bulletin" found that the largest surface displacements measured 2.4 meters, while the use of satellite imagery to model the earthquake rupture found a maximum slip of 6 meters near the hypocenter. In another earthquake model, up to 7 meters of coseismic slip occurred on the shallow 12 km of the rupture. Meanwhile, another study published in "Geophysical Research Letters