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On February 6, 2023, southern Trkiye was hit by two major earthquakes at 01:17 UTC (Mw 7.8, Pazarck, Kahramanmara) and at 10:30 UTC (Mw 7.6, Elbistan, Kahramanmara) leading to severe damages at the complex junction of the Dead Sea Fault (DSF), the Cyprus arc and the East Anatolian fault zone (EAFZ). The ruptures propagated along several known strands of the southwestern termination of the EAFZ, the main Pazarck and Karasu valley faults and the ardac-Srg fault. The spatial extent of the impacted zone (300 x 300 km) supports the use of satellite images to map ruptures and damages and measure the co-seismic displacement over the whole region. Among the different satellite constellation available nowadays, Sentinel-2 presents the advantages of offering high-resolution images (10 m), global coverage with frequent revisit time and open access policy to the images. We here present the high-resolution mapping of the entire coseismic surface ruptures derived from image correlation of optical Sentinel-2 satellite acquisitions. We further estimated the rupture width, the total and on-fault offset, and of the diffuse deformation obtained a few days after the two mainshocks along the two main ruptures at 50 m resolution along the rupture. The mapping and the estimation of the offset are validated with the location of the rupture and the offset measurements collected on the ground. We found that the ruptures extend over lengths of 310 km and 140 km, with maximum offsets reaching 7.50.8 m and 8.70.8 m near the epicenters, for the Mw 7.8 and Mw 7.6 mainshocks, respectively. We propose a segmentation of the two ruptures based on these observations, and further discuss the location of potential supershear rupture. The use of optical image correlation complemented by field investigations along earthquake faults provides new insights into seismic hazard assessment.
Provost et al. (Mon,) studied this question.