Depth‐dependent stress field in and around the Atotsugawa fault, central Japan, deduced from microearthquake focal mechanisms: Evidence for localized aseismic deformation in the downward extension of the fault

Focal mechanisms have been determined from P wave polarity data as well as body wave amplitudes for 154 microearthquakes that occurred around the Atotsugawa fault in central Japan between 2002 and 2004. While we found many microearthquakes with a pure strike‐slip mechanism that is similar to the faulting style of the Atotsugawa fault, a considerable number of microearthquakes with reverse faulting components are also occurring. Most of the P axes are horizontal and oriented in the WNW‐ESE direction, which conforms to the general tectonic trend in this area. In contrast, the T axes have a wide range of plunge, suggesting that reverse‐faulting‐type earthquakes as well as strike‐slip ones are occurring. The most conspicuous feature in the focal mechanism distribution is the depth dependence, where shallow earthquakes are primarily reverse faulting and strike‐slip earthquakes become predominant with depth. A stress tensor inversion reveals that the shallower part is characterized by a mixture of reverse and strike‐slip faulting regimes and that a pure strike‐slip faulting regime appears only around the bottom of the seismogenic zone. Together with other geophysical observational evidence for the fault, we suggest that the existence of a localized aseismic deformation below the Atotsugawa fault is the simplest scenario that can explain the observed stress fields. This scenario provides a stress accumulation mechanism of disastrous shallow inland earthquakes, in which the localized aseismic deformation accumulates stress onto the fault plane in the seismogenic zone during an earthquake cycle and the main shock would occur when the failure stress is reached on the fault.