At the Seismological Society of America’s Annual Meeting, researchers posed a seemingly simple question: how wide are faults?
At the Seismological Society of America’s Annual Meeting, researchers posed a seemingly simple question: how wide are faults?
Using data compiled from single earthquakes across the world, Christie Rowe of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno and Alex Hatem of the U.S. Geological Survey sought a more comprehensive answer, one that considers both surface and deep traces of seismic rupture and creep.
By compiling observations of recent earthquakes, Rowe and Hatem conclude that from Turkey to California, it’s not just a single strand of a fault but quite often a branching network of fault strands involved in an earthquake, making the fault zone hundreds of meters wide.
“So that suggests that significant parts of the broad array of fractures that develops over many earthquakes can be activated in a single earthquake,” said Rowe, who noted that this width sometimes roughly corresponds to the width of Alquist-Priolo zones established for safe building in California.
Read more at Seismological Society of America
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