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International audience; Vertical velocities obtained from uplifted river terrace dating near mountain fronts are commonly converted into overthrusting slip rates assuming simple geometry of the fault at depth. However, the lack of information on the dip angle of these shallow structures can lead to misinterpretation in the accommodation of convergence, and thus to erroneous conclusions on the transfer of shortening to the emergent thrust faults. Here, to assess the impact of fault geometry, we focus on the eastern Himalayan region in the south Central Bhutan, where the topographic frontal thrust (TFT) has been already documented by GPS, paleoseismic, geomorphic and geological studies. This study is based on high-resolution near-surface geophysical investigations, including electrical resistivity, seismic and gravity measurements. Using a similar stochastic inversion approach for all data sets, new quantitative constraints on both fault geometry and petrophysical parameters are obtained to image shallow depths, in the upper ca. 80 m. The combined results from both surface observations and geophysical measurement provide a TFT geometry that is dipping northwards with a shallow angle at the top (0–5 m), steeply dipping in the middle (5–40 m) and flattening at deeper depths (>40 m). Together, our new constraints on the fault geometry allow us to estimate a minimum overthrusting slip rate of 10 ± 2 mm yr−1, which is only a part of the ca. 17 mm yr−1 GPS convergence. This suggests that, in the study area, significant deformation partitioning on several faults including TFT and the Main Boundary Thrust cannot be ruled out. More importantly, assuming constant slip rate, the obtained dip angle variations lead to uplift rate changes with distance to the TFT. This underlines that taking into account uplift rate from terrace dating only at the front location and assuming a constant dip angle fault geometry based on surface observations may significantly bias the slip rate estimates.

International audience; Although the first-order pattern of present-day deformation is relatively well resolved across the Himalayas, irregular data coverage limits detailed analyses of spatial variations of interseismic coupling. We provide the first GPS velocity field for the Bhutan Himalaya. Combined with published data, these observations show strong east-west variations in coupling between central and eastern Bhutan. In contrast with previous estimations of first-order uniform interseismic coupling along the Himalayan arc, we identify significant lateral variations: In western and central Bhutan, the fully coupled segment is 135–155 km wide with an abrupt downdip transition, whereas in eastern Bhutan the fully coupled segment is 100–120 km wide and is limited updip and downdip by partially creeping segments. This is the first observation of decoupling on the upper ramp along the Himalayan arc, with important implications for large earthquake surface rupture and seismic hazard.