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Determining Fault Geometries From Surface Displacements

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Abstract

We introduce a new algorithm for determining the geometry of active parts of faults. This algorithm uses surface measurements of displacement fields and local modeling of the Earth’s crust as a half-space elastic medium. The numerical method relies on iterations alternating non-linear steps for recovering the geometry and linear steps for reconstructing slip fields. Our algorithm greatly improves upon past attempts at reconstructing fault profiles. We argue that these past attempts suffered from either the restrictive assumption that the geometry of faults can be derived using only uniformly constant slips or that they relied on arbitrary assumptions on the statistics of the reconstruction error. We test this algorithm on the 2006 Guerrero, Mexico, slow slip event (SSE) and on the 2009 SSE for the same region. These events occurred on a relatively well-known subduction zone, whose geometry was derived from seismicity and gravimetric techniques, see Kostoglodov et al. (Geophys Res Lett 23(23):3385–3388, 1996), Pardo and Suarez (J Geophys Res 100(B7):357–373, 1995), Singh and Pardo (Geophys Res Lett 20(14):1483–1486, 1993), so our results can be compared to known benchmarks. Our derived geometry is found to be consistent with these benchmarks regarding dip and strike angles and the positioning of the North American Trench. In addition, our derived slip distribution is also consistent with previous studies (all done with an assumed fixed geometry), see Larson et al. (Geophys Res Lett 34(13), 2007), Bekaert et al. (J Geophys Res: Solid Earth 120(2):1357–1375, 2015), Radiguet et al. (Geophys J Int 184(2):816–828, 2011, J Geophys Res 2012), Rivet et al. (Geophys Res Lett 38(8), 2011), Vergnolle et al. (J Geophys Res: Solid Earth 115(B8), 2010), Walpersdorf et al. Geophys Res Lett 38(15), 2011), to name a few. We believe that the new computational inverse method introduced in this paper holds great promise for applications to blind inversion cases, where both geometry and slip distribution are unknown.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to M. Campillo for his guidance and multiple enlightening discussions. We also wish to thank A. Walpersdorf for kindly supplying us with GPS data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematical Sciences, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, 01609, USA

    D. Volkov

  2. ISTerre, Université Grenoble-Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble, France

    C. Voisin

  3. Institut Galilée, Université Paris 13, Paris, France

    I. R. Ionescu

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  1. D. Volkov
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  2. C. Voisin
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Correspondence to D. Volkov.

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D. Volkov is supported by a Simons Foundation Collaboration Grant.

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Volkov, D., Voisin, C. & Ionescu, I.R. Determining Fault Geometries From Surface Displacements. Pure Appl. Geophys. 174, 1659–1678 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-017-1497-y

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