The Mw=6.8 Tarlay earthquake occurred in western part of Nam Ma fault, Myanmar, on March 24th, 2011.
The hypocenter was located at 20.705N, 99.949E and the depth was approximately 10 kilometers below
surface as estimated by USGS [1]. This is the ensuing strongest seismic event on SE-Asia peninsular since
the 2004 Mw=9.2 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake [2] which caused the Indian Ocean tsunami and became
one of the big catastrophic events in this century. Shake resulted from Tarlay earthquake was felt in
Kunming, Hanoi and even Bangkok which are several hundred kilometers from the epicenter.
The Nam Ma fault, a NE-SW trending strike-slip fault, originates in southern China, extends as a
narrow 215 kilometers long into northwest Laos and propagates into northern Myanmar [3] with a 12
kilometers left-lateral offset of the Mekong River channel at the central part of the fault [4]. Nam Ma Fault
lies in about 60 kilometers north of another left-lateral in northern Thailand called Mae Chan fault [2].
These two left-lateral faults are farther to the southeast in the central Shan-Sino domain and the geology
details can be found in [5]. The faults are members of a group of left-lateral faults in Shan fault system
posing as network triangle faults between Sagaing fault in Myanmar and Red River fault in northern
Vietnam. Many large earthquakes occurred in this fault system since late 20th century [6, 7] as shown in