Effects of Fault Roughness on Coseismic Slip and Earthquake Locations
Abstract
We report that fault zone structure is well known to exert strong controls on earthquake properties including coseismic slip distribution, rupture propagation direction, and hypocenter location. It has also been well established that the principal slip surface, which accommodates the majority of earthquake displacement, exhibits roughness at all scales following self-affine fractal distributions. Here we explore the relationship between fault roughness and specific earthquake properties including coseismic slip distribution and hypocenter location based on long-term simulations of earthquake catalogs on fractally rough faults. We begin by using the von Kármán autocorrelation function to procedurally generate single faults with different fractal roughness properties, which we place in a homogeneous elastic solid and apply pure right-lateral shear at a constant back slip rate with the earthquake simulator RSQSim. Running the simulations for 10,000 years each, we generate millions of earthquakes including thousands of events with Mw > 6.0, which rupture the surface. We show that the patterns of surface rupture in these large events follow self-affine fractal distributions with consistent fractal dimension related distinctly to the fractal dimension of the fault. In addition, the hypocenters of these large events occur in very specific predictable locations where the longest wavelength structure produces amore »
- Authors:
-
- Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (United States)
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)
- Univ. of California, Riverside, CA (United States)
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1616395
- Report Number(s):
- LLNL-JRNL-752108
Journal ID: ISSN 2169-9313; 937928
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC52-07NA27344
- Resource Type:
- Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Geophysical Research. Solid Earth
- Additional Journal Information:
- Journal Volume: 124; Journal Issue: 11; Journal ID: ISSN 2169-9313
- Publisher:
- American Geophysical Union
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 58 GEOSCIENCES; fault roughness; earthquake catalog simulation; rate‐state friction; preferred earthquake location
Citation Formats
Allam, A. A., Kroll, K. A., Milliner, C. W. D., and Richards‐Dinger, K. B. Effects of Fault Roughness on Coseismic Slip and Earthquake Locations. United States: N. p., 2019.
Web. doi:10.1029/2018JB016216.
Allam, A. A., Kroll, K. A., Milliner, C. W. D., & Richards‐Dinger, K. B. Effects of Fault Roughness on Coseismic Slip and Earthquake Locations. United States. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JB016216
Allam, A. A., Kroll, K. A., Milliner, C. W. D., and Richards‐Dinger, K. B. Thu .
"Effects of Fault Roughness on Coseismic Slip and Earthquake Locations". United States. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JB016216. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1616395.
@article{osti_1616395,
title = {Effects of Fault Roughness on Coseismic Slip and Earthquake Locations},
author = {Allam, A. A. and Kroll, K. A. and Milliner, C. W. D. and Richards‐Dinger, K. B.},
abstractNote = {We report that fault zone structure is well known to exert strong controls on earthquake properties including coseismic slip distribution, rupture propagation direction, and hypocenter location. It has also been well established that the principal slip surface, which accommodates the majority of earthquake displacement, exhibits roughness at all scales following self-affine fractal distributions. Here we explore the relationship between fault roughness and specific earthquake properties including coseismic slip distribution and hypocenter location based on long-term simulations of earthquake catalogs on fractally rough faults. We begin by using the von Kármán autocorrelation function to procedurally generate single faults with different fractal roughness properties, which we place in a homogeneous elastic solid and apply pure right-lateral shear at a constant back slip rate with the earthquake simulator RSQSim. Running the simulations for 10,000 years each, we generate millions of earthquakes including thousands of events with Mw > 6.0, which rupture the surface. We show that the patterns of surface rupture in these large events follow self-affine fractal distributions with consistent fractal dimension related distinctly to the fractal dimension of the fault. In addition, the hypocenters of these large events occur in very specific predictable locations where the longest wavelength structure produces a stress asperity (i.e., restraining bend). The resulting patterns can explain many features observed on real fault systems, including clustered hypocenter locations, spatially variable coseismic slip distributions, and characteristic slip recurrence behavior. Lastly, these results demonstrate a quantitative link between a directly measurable fault property—roughness—and the properties of future earthquakes.},
doi = {10.1029/2018JB016216},
journal = {Journal of Geophysical Research. Solid Earth},
number = 11,
volume = 124,
place = {United States},
year = {Thu Jul 18 00:00:00 EDT 2019},
month = {Thu Jul 18 00:00:00 EDT 2019}
}
Web of Science
Figures / Tables:
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