Deformation, strains and velocities for the Alpine Himalayan Belt from trans-continental Sentinel-1 InSAR & GNSS

Surface velocities and strain rates from satellite geodesy have become essential tools for understanding the distribution of tectonic deformation, faulting and seismic hazard. However, across large regions of distributed continental deformation, such as the Alpine-Himalayan Belt, data are only sparsely available. While previous studies have mainly used spatially sparse GNSS to measure deformation at such large scales, these approaches cannot characterize shorter wavelength features of deformation in many places. We use Sentinel-1 radar images acquired during 2016–2024 to provide trans-national average surface velocities and time series at 1 km spatial resolution stretching a distance of over 11,000 km from south-western Europe to eastern China, covering an area more than 20 million square kilometres. We produce the velocity field by combining data from over 222,000 Sentinel-1 SAR images with a new belt-wide compilation of GNSS velocities, all combined in a consistent Eurasian reference frame. Horizontal strain rates are derived from gradients of the velocity field, yielding near-continuous spatial deformation information over the entirety of the largest deforming region on the planet. The horizontal velocities and strains are dominated by tectonic deformation, which has a bimodal behaviour – focused on major faults but distributed elsewhere. Shorter-wavelength vertical velocities are dominated by non-tectonic processes, in particular the widespread over-exploitation of groundwater. Our new velocity and strain rates are foundational data sets that reveal the details of how the continents deform for the first time at trans-continental scale.