The Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica, was struck by a long-anticipated and gap-filling Mw 7.6 earthquake in 2012. To study interseismic strain accumulation on the megathrust beneath the Nicoya Peninsula, we present an improved interseismic coupling model by integrating interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) and GPS data. Our model reveals three strongly coupled patches. The first strongly coupled patch locates beneath the Nicoya Peninsula and ruptured during the 2012 earthquake. The second strongly coupled patch locates offshore the central Nicoya Peninsula and remained largely unbroken. However, this region is close to and possibly intermingled with shallow slow slip and tremor, suggesting that accumulated strain in this region may be released both seismically and aseismically. The third strongly coupled patch offshore of the southeastern end of Nicoya overlaps part of the coseismic rupture of the 1990 Mw 7.0 Nicoya Gulf earthquake, indicating that significant strain has re-accumulated since this event. Incorporating InSAR data provides a more refined interseismic coupling model than using GPS alone and allows for a more reliable comparison with local seismic and aseismic activities. This comparison indicates that strongly locked regions during the interseismic stage are the loci of coseismic slip, and deep slow slip and low-frequency earthquakes occur in regions of low coupling or transition zones from low to high coupling, while shallow slow slip and tremor commingle with strongly coupled regions. Our study demonstrates that InSAR data can be used to recover small long-wavelength deformation signals with refined resolution in challenging subduction zone environments when integrated with GPS observations

The concept of a weak asthenospheric layer underlying Earth's mobile tectonic plates is fundamental to our understanding of mantle convection and plate tectonics. However, little is known about the mechanical properties of the asthenosphere (the part of the upper mantle below the lithosphere) underlying the oceanic crust, which covers about 60 per cent of Earth's surface. Great earthquakes cause large coseismic crustal deformation in areas hundreds of kilometres away from and below the rupture area. Subsequent relaxation of the earthquake-induced stresses in the viscoelastic upper mantle leads to prolonged postseismic crustal deformation that may last several decades and can be recorded with geodetic methods. The observed postseismic deformation helps us to understand the rheological properties of the upper mantle, but so far such measurements have been limited to continental-plate boundary zones. Here we consider the postseismic deformation of the very large (moment magnitude 8.6) 2012 Indian Ocean earthquake to provide by far the most direct constraint on the structure of oceanic mantle rheology. In the first three years after the Indian Ocean earthquake, 37 continuous Global Navigation Satellite Systems stations in the region underwent horizontal northeastward displacements of up to 17 centimetres in a direction similar to that of the coseismic offsets. However, a few stations close to the rupture area that had experienced subsidence of up to about 4 centimetres during the earthquake rose by nearly 7 centimetres after the earthquake. Our three-dimensional viscoelastic finite-element models of the post-earthquake deformation show that a thin (30-200 kilometres), low-viscosity (having a steady-state Maxwell viscosity of (0.5-10) × 10¹⁸ pascal seconds) asthenospheric layer beneath the elastic oceanic lithosphere is required to produce the observed postseismic uplift.