Abstract
In 1994 a sequence of five earthquakes with Mw 5.5–6.2 occurred in the Sistan belt of eastern Iran, all of them involving motion on blind thrusts with centroid depths of 5–10 km. Coseismic ruptures at the surface involved bedding‐plane slip on a growing hanging‐wall anticline displaying geomorphological evidence of uplift and lateral propagation. The 1994 earthquakes were associated with a NW‐trending thrust system that splays off the northern termination of a major N–S right‐lateral strike‐slip fault. Elevation changes along the anticline ridge suggest that displacement on the underlying thrust dies out to the NW, away from its intersection with the strike‐slip fault. This is a common fault configuration in eastern Iran and accommodates oblique NE–SW shortening across the N–S deforming zone, probably by anticlockwise rotations about a vertical axis. This style of fault kinematics may be transitional to a more evolved state that involves partitioning of the strike‐slip and convergent motion onto separate subparallel faults.