Power-law Maxwell rheologies and the interaction between tectonic and seismic deformations

In a lithosphere where dislocation creep dominates the steady-state flow and the viscosity is stress-dependent, the equilibrium between tectonic stress and strain rate is broken after an earthquake due to the sudden coseismic stress change. The imbalance between tectonic stress and strain rate manifests itself during the post-seismic phase and, when seismic stress is comparable or smaller than tectonic stress, it affects post-seismic deformation via an effective anisotropy along the principal axes of the tectonic stress tensor. This issue is herein discussed within the framework of post-seismic models based on power-law Maxwell rheologies and, in the limit case of seismic stress much smaller than tectonic stress, we obtain a first-order approximation of the rheology which results into a linear anisotropic Maxwell model and we find that the effective anisotropy is associated to a two-modal relaxation characterized by the Maxwell time and the Maxwell time divided by the power-law index. Thus, as far as the steady-state flow within the lithosphere is dominated by dislocation creep, linear isotropic viscoelastic rheologies, like Newtonian Maxwell and Burgers models, represent a severe oversimplification which does not account for the physics of post-seismic deformation. This new physics is discussed characterizing the stress state of the ductile layers of the lithosphere before and after the earthquake for normal, inverse and strike mechanisms and for a variety of continental seismogenic zones and thermal models. We show that the first-order approximation of the power-law Maxwell rheology is valid for a quite wide range of small and moderate earthquakes. The most restrictive upper bounds of the seismic magnitude (which hold for the hottest thermal model here considered, with lithospheric thickness of H = 80 km and surface heat flux of Q = 70 mW m(-2)) occur for normal and inverse earthquakes and are 5.6 or 6.3 for a lower crust of wet diorite or felsic granulite, and 6.5 for a mantle of wet olivine. The upper bounds increase by about 0.3-0.4 for strike earthquakes and by more than 1.0 for the cold thermal model (H = 200 km and Q = 50 mW m(-2)).