Earthquake Science Center

Fault-related folds and their associated secondary faults play a critical yet often underrecognized role in accommodating strain and generating earthquakes in active fold-and-thrust belts. In the Seattle fault zone (SFZ), Washington, USA, we present new paleoseismic, geomorphic, and geophysical evidence for late Pleistocene and Holocene earthquakes on shallow, south-dipping secondary...

Visible-to-shortwave infrared (VSWIR) reflectance spectroscopy has revolutionized our understanding of planetary surface compositions. However, space-weathering processes on airless bodies complicate quantitative compositional analyses. Here, we present a framework to isolate the signatures of space weathering in VSWIR spectra of lunar maria by leveraging radiative transfer modeling...

We develop a simple explanation for Gutenberg-Richter (G-R) size scaling of earthquakes on a single fault. We discretize the fault and consider all possible contiguous ruptures at that level of discretization. In this static model, we assume that slip scales with rupture length, and that the rupture rates at each point along the fault are consistent with an a priori long-term slip rate...