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...

S U M M A R Y The arrival pattern (AP) method and teleseismic data have been used to relocate aftershocks following three major (M w >= 7.8) interplate earthquakes that occurred in eastern Papua New Guinea in 2000 November. The first event was an M w = 8.0 strike-slip earthquake that ruptured the Weitin fault over a length of ∼100 km. No aftershocks were located in the upper 15 km, suggesting t...

[1] To explore aftershock-triggering mechanisms for the 2003 Big Bear, California earthquake sequence, we determined differential travel-times and applied the double-difference technique to relocate these events, which formed three clusters. The main cluster coincides with the 3 km long northwest striking sub-vertical mainshock fault. The other two sub-vertical clusters, located at opposite end...

The Atlantic segment of the Africa-Europe plate boundary has usually been interpreted as a transform boundary on the basis of the bathymetric expression of the Gloria fault and dextral strike-slip first-motion mechanisms aligned along the Azores-Gibraltar line of seismicity. The 1975 May 26 earthquake (Ms=7.9) was assumed to fit into this framework because it occurred in the general area of thi...

[1] To explore aftershock-triggering mechanisms for the 2003 Big Bear, California earthquake sequence, we determined differential travel-times and applied the double-difference technique to relocate these events, which formed three clusters. The main cluster coincides with the 3 km long northwest striking sub-vertical mainshock fault. The other two sub-vertical clusters, located at opposite end...

Seismic anisotropy and P-wave delays in New Zealand imply widespread deformation in the underlying mantle, not slip on a narrow fault zone, which is characteristic of plate boundaries in oceanic regions. Large magnitudes of shear-wave splitting and orientations of fast polarization parallel to the Alpine fault show that pervasive simple shear of the mantle lithosphere has accommodated the cumul...

In addition to overall uplift of the Qiabuqia region during Late Cenozoic, three deformation stages can be identified in northeastern Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Specifically, these were recognized areas east Gonghe Basin that surrounds Waliguan Mountain and include: 1) Miocene Pliocene deformation—dominated by thrust napping with dextral strike-slipping; 2) Early Pleistocene late middle period defo...

Many areas of the Earth's crust deform by distributed extensional faulting and complex fault interactions are often observed. Geodetic data generally indicate a simpler picture of continuum deformation over decades but relating this behaviour to earthquake occurrence over centuries, given numerous potentially active faults, remains a global problem in hazard assessment. We address this challeng...

We investigate the spatial pattern of surface creep and off-fault deformation along the southern segment of the San Andreas Fault using a combination of multiple interferometric synthetic aperture radar viewing geometries and survey-mode GPS occupations of a dense array crossing the fault. Radar observations from Envisat during the period 2003–2010 were used to separate the pattern of horizonta...