TY - JOUR A1 - Viltres, Renier A1 - Nobile, Adriano A1 - Vasyura-Bathke, Hannes A1 - Trippanera, Daniele A1 - Xu, Wenbin A1 - Jónsson, Sigurjón T1 - Transtensional rupture within a diffuse plate boundary zone during the 2020 M-w 6.4 Puerto Rico earthquake T2 - Seismological research letters N2 - On 7 January 2020, an M-w 6.4 earthquake occurred in the northeastern Caribbean, a few kilometers offshore of the island of Puerto Rico. It was the mainshock of a complex seismic sequence, characterized by a large number of energetic earthquakes illuminating an east-west elongated area along the southwestern coast of Puerto Rico. Deformation fields constrained by Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar and Global Navigation Satellite System data indicate that the coseismic movements affected only the western part of the island. To assess the mainshock's source fault parameters, we combined the geodetically derived coseismic deformation with teleseismic waveforms using Bayesian inference. The results indicate a roughly east-west oriented fault, dipping northward and accommodating similar to 1.4 m of transtensional motion. Besides, the determined location and orientation parameters suggest an offshore continuation of the recently mapped North Boqueron Bay-Punta Montalva fault in southwest Puerto Rico. This highlights the existence of unmapped faults with moderate-to-large earthquake potential within the Puerto Rico region. Y1 - 2022 UR - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62195 SN - 0895-0695 SN - 1938-2057 VL - 93 IS - 2A SP - 567 EP - 583 PB - Seismological Society of America CY - Boulder, Colo. ER -