Stability of Northern Eurasia from Satellite Geodesy Data

Abstract—The geodynamics of Northern Eurasia has been analyzed based on repeated coordinate solutions for GNSS stations throughout the Russian Federation territory from 2015 to the present. Two sources of data were used for this purpose: observations at the stations of the Russian Fundamental Astro-Geodetic Network (FAGN) and stations of the International GNSS Service (IGS) with permanent satellite tracking. This data set allowed one to estimate correctness of the block kinematics of the Eurasian plate in three tectonic plate motion models: NUVEL-1A, NNR-MORVEL-56, and ITRF2014. The analysis of the misfits between the observed and model velocities has shown that these misfits have a systematic component in the vicinity of the East European Platform, which differs for each of three models. In addition to analyzing the block kinematics of the Eurasian Plate, we also evaluated its internal stability. For this purpose, we calculated the areal deformations of Northern Eurasia using the finite element method. To this end, the processing results of two original datasets were complemented by the results for the observation data from the global dataset of the Nevada Geodetic Laboratory. Besides interplate boundary deformations, which are consistent with existing ideas of the geodynamics of Northern Eurasia, the strain field analysis also revealed intraplate deformations distributed consistently with the configuration of the Northern Eurasia cratons.