[1] Coseismic deformation of the ground can be measured from aerial views taken before and after an earthquake. We chose the area of the Kickapoo-Landers step over along the 1992 Landers earthquake zone, using air photos (scale 1:40,000) scanned at 0.4 m resolution. Two photos acquired after the earthquake are used to assess the accuracy and to evaluate various sources of noise. Optical distort...

Fault step-overs with linking dip-slip faults are common features on long strike-slip fault systems worldwide. It has been noted by various researchers that under some circumstances, earthquakes can jump across fault step-overs to cascade into large events, while under other circumstances rupture is arrested at stepovers. There is also evidence that fault step-overs may be preferential location...

By integrating eeects of microscopic interactions between statisticaly self-similar fault surfaces, we succeeded in deriving a slip-and time-dependent fault constitutive law that rationally uniies the slip-dependent law and the rate-and state-dependent law (Aochi and Matsu'ura, 199881]). In this con-stitutive law the slip-weakening results from the abrasion of surface asperities that proceeds i...

[1] We report on laboratory experiments which investigate interactions between aseismic slip, stress changes, and seismicity on a critically stressed fault during the nucleation of stick-slip instability. We monitor quasi-static and dynamic changes in local shear stress and fault slip with arrays of gages deployed along a simulated strike-slip fault (2m long and 0.4m deep) in a saw cut sample o...

Slow-slip events, or ‘silent earthquakes’, have recently been discovered in a number of subduction zones including the Nankai trough in Japan, Cascadia, and Guerrero in Mexico, but the depths of these events have been difficult to determine from surface deformation measurements. Although it is assumed that these silent earthquakes are located along the plate megathrust, this has not been proved...

[1] The space‐time fault displacement history of the 11 March 2011 Tohoku (Mw 9.1) megathrust earthquake is obtained by least‐squares inversion of high‐rate (1 sample per second) GPS ground motions recorded in Japan. Complete near‐source time‐varying and static ground motions for periods ≥25 s are fit in the inversion using a normal mode formalism to compute the Green functions. The basic ruptu...

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...

Hindu Kush subduction zone produces large intermediate-depth earthquakes within a small volume every 10–15 years. Here we study the last three M ≥ 7 events within the cluster and find complex and diverse rupture processes. However, their main subevents appear to recur on the same fault patch, dipping 70° to the south. This recurrence requires an average of 9.6 cm/yr slip rate on the patch, much...

Recent observations suggesting the influence of creep on earthquakes nucleation and arrest are strong incentives to investigate the physical mechanisms controlling how active faults slip. We focus here on deriving generic characteristics of shallow creep along the Haiyuan fault, a major strike-slip fault in China, by investigating the relationship between fault slip and geometry. We use optical...