Stress loading history of earthquake faults influenced by fault/shear zone geometry and Coulomb pre-stress

Sgambato, Claudia and Faure Walker, Joanna and Mildon, Zoe and Roberts, Gerald P. (2020) Stress loading history of earthquake faults influenced by fault/shear zone geometry and Coulomb pre-stress. Scientific Reports 10 , p. 12724. ISSN 2045-2322.

Abstract

Whether the stress-loading of faults to failure in earthquakes is random or to an extent explainable, given constraints on fault/shear-zone interaction and the build-up and release of stress over many earthquake cycles, is a key question for seismic hazard assessment. Here we investigate earthquake recurrence for a system of 25 active normal faults arranged predominantly along strike from each other, allowing us to isolate the effects of stress-loading due to regional strain versus across- and along-strike fault interaction. We calculate stress changes over 6 centuries due to interseismic loading and 25 >Mw 5.5 earthquakes. Where only one fault exists across strike, stress-loading is dominated by the regional tectonics through slip on underlying shear zones and fault planes have spatially smooth stress with predominantly time-dependent stress increase. Conversely, where faults are stress-loaded by across-strike fault interactions, fault planes have more irregular stress patterns and interaction-influenced stress loading histories. Stress-loading to failure in earthquakes is not the same for all faults and is dependent on the geometry of the fault/shear-zone system.

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