The New Madrid seismic zone (NMSZ) in the central United States is one of the most active regions of intraplate seismicity in North America and site of the devastating 1811–1812 earthquake sequence (Nuttli, 1973; Johnston and Schweig, 1996). The NMSZ lies within the NE–SW trending Reelfoot rift (Fig. 1), which represents a failed rift arm that developed during the Late Proterozoic and Early Cam...

Understanding the strength and slip behaviour of tectonic faults is a central problem in earthquake physics and seismichazard assessment1–8. Many major faults, including the San Andreas Fault, are weak compared with the surrounding rock, but the cause of this weakness is debated1. Previous measurements of the frictional strength of San Andreas Fault rocks are too high to explain the observed we...

[1] The Gibraltar Arc in the western Mediterranean consists of the Betic and Rif Alpine chains and the Alboran Sea Basin. Four types of stress indicators (wellbore breakouts, earthquake focal plane mechanisms, young geologic fault slip data, and hydraulic fracture orientations) indicate a regional NW–SE compressive stress field resulting from Africa-Eurasia plate convergence. In some particular...

a r t i c l e i n f o Recent high-resolution GPS and seismological data reveal that tectonic faults exhibit complex, multi-mode slip behavior including earthquakes, creep events, slow and silent earthquakes, low-frequency events and earthquake afterslip. The physical processes responsible for this range of behavior and the mechanisms that dictate fault slip rate or rupture propagation velocity ...

Abstract Fault zones along active tectonic block boundaries are a significant source of devastating continental earthquakes. Strong earthquakes produce disruptions sediment and induce characteristic sediments near the fault, which serve as valuable sedimentary evidence for identifying dating paleoearthquakes. In this study, we aimed to reconstruct earthquake history Qilian–Haiyuan fault zone in...

Late Quaternary slip rates and satellite-based geodetic data for the western Great Basin constrain regional fault-slip distribution and evolution. The geologic slip rate on the Fish Lake Valley fault zone (the northwest extension of the Furnace Creek fault zone) increases northward from about 3 to 5 mm/yr, in agreement with modeled geodetic data. The increase coincides with the intersections of...

The Izeh fault zone is a transverse fault zone with dextral strike slip (and some reverse component) in the Zagros Mountains (Iran). It causes some structural deformations. This fault zone is acting as eastern boundary of Dezful Embayment and forms subsidence of the embayment. The fault has been recognized using remote sensing techniques in conjunction with surface and subsurface analyses. The ...

The crystalline basement of New Zealand shows a chi-shaped combination of the straight Alpine Fault and a curved late Paleozoic continental margin, so that the plutonic basement of northern Fiordland converges toward the plane of the Alpine Fault. On the ground along Milford Sound the petrography suggests (1) a gradual change from amphibolite and granulite fades in the west to igneous fabrics d...

S U M M A R Y We present a semi-analytic iterative procedure for evaluating the 3-D deformation due to faults in an arbitrarily heterogeneous elastic half-space. Spatially variable elastic properties are modelled with equivalent body forces and equivalent surface traction in a ‘homogenized’ elastic medium. The displacement field is obtained in the Fourier domain using a semi-analytic Green func...