The relationship between individual earthquakes and the longer-term growth of topography and of geological structures is not fully understood, but is key to our ability to make use of topographic and geological data sets in the contexts of seismic hazard and wider-scale tectonics. Using observations of an earthquake at the edge of the Tarim Basin,…
Tag: Folding
Hazard in regions of distributed shortening
The 2011 October 23 MW 7.1 Van earthquake in eastern Turkey caused ∼600 deaths and caused widespread damage and economic loss. The seismogenic rupture was restricted to 10–25 km in depth, but aseismic surface creep, coincident with outcrop fault exposures, was observed in the hours to months after the earthquake. We combine observations from radar interferometry, seismology, geomorphology and…
Jumping Earthquakes: limits to rupture forecasting exposed by instantaneously triggered earthquake doublet
An important question in understanding the potential magnitude of earthquakes, and consequently the hazard certain faults may pose, is the distance over which earthquakes can jump during rupture. This is because a critical observation of earthquake scaling which holds true is that the longer a fault rupture, the larger the earthquake. In a bigger earthquake,…
Insights into seismic and aseismic shortening of the Zagros sedimentary cover
Our findings on the 2013 Khaki earthquake in Iran suggest lithology plays a
significant role in the depth extent of slip found in reverse faults in folded belts, providing an important
control on the potential size of earthquakes.
John Elliott 