DInSAR investigation in the Pärvie endglacial fault region, Lapland, Sweden

Journal article, 2013

Northern Fennoscandia bears witness to the Pleistocene glaciation in the form of a series of large faults that have been shown to have ruptured immediately after the retreat of the ice sheet, about 9500 years ago. The largest one, known as the Pärvie fault, consists of a 155 km long linear series of fault scarps forming north–northeast-trending, that stretch west of Kiruna, Lapland. End-glacial intra-plate faults of this extent are very rare in the continental crust and the Pärvie system represents one of the major fault zone structures of this type in the world. Seismological evidence shows that there is still noticeable seismic activity, roughly one event of magnitude 2 per year that can be attributed to the fault. Nevertheless assessing its state of activity is a difficult task due to the extent and remoteness of the area. This study is aimed at the determination of crustal motion around the Pärvie fault zone using the differential inter-ferometric synthetic aperture radar (DInSAR) technique, based on images acquired with the European Space Agency (ESA) satellites European Remote Sensing (ERS) 1, ERS-2, and the Environmental Satellite (ENVISAT). We present results achieved in terms of deformation of the crystalline bedrock along different sectors of the fault where high levels of coherence were obtained, even from image pairs several years apart. This finding does not exclude deformation in other segments, as observing conditions are not always as favourable in terms of data availability.