Evidence and description of the earthquake and the possibility of finding the paleo-earthquake concentrating on the Tabas Earthquake

Earthquakes with a large magnitude affect people, man-made buildings and environments. This information can be a dataset of the earthquake description consisting of people’s feelings, the building damages, and the effects on the earth. For the building damages, different types of buildings should be considered to find the best dataset of the earthquake. For the effects on the earth, various environmental effects such as the displacements, landslides, rock falls, liquefactions, surface and chemical changes on the rivers and springs, etc. should be considered; more information of more situations, more accurate exports of the earthquake. According to global research in this field, using this information can be useful to assess the macroseismic intensity of the affected areas and the epicentral earthquake. Moreover, having a good dataset of these descriptions, the macroseismic parameters of the earthquake can also be estimated. It can be useful especially for the earthquakes with low or/ and lack of information in the earthquake catalogs and also paleo-earthquakes. This study concentrates on the Tabas earthquake, which occurred on September 16, 1978, in the Tabas region located in eastern Iran. This was a shallow earthquake felt in a region with 1130000km2 total affected area. Such as every large earthquake, several phenomena were observed related to this event. For example, it destroyed 1500 building units and 30 Qantas. Although the epicenter of the earthquake was located in a situation with a poor population, it destroyed or severely damaged 90 villages and slightly damaged other 50 villages. The surface rupture of this event was extended for about 85km with no connection on the surface with a trust mechanism. Moreover, 150cm vertical displacement and 300cm horizontal displacement were reported for this event. According to these descriptions of Tabas earthquake with magnitude more than 6, occurring more earthquakes in the past can be usual for this region; then, more investigation on this field is necessary. Therefore, in this study, primarily investigation on this region was started using the available maps (e.g. geology map) and images (e.g. Landsat) and for the following researches the locations near Ali Abad in NW of Tabas were suggested for the field study and sampling to date their absolute ages.