PubTalk 5/2021 - Where Earthquakes Hide in the Desert

Title: Where Earthquakes Hide in the Desert: What we've learned from recent fault ruptures in the western U.S.

By Austin J. Elliott, USGS Research Geologist

• Three large earthquakes since 2019 have ruptured incompletely mapped faults in the western U.S.
• Both satellite and field measurements give extremely detailed maps of how the ground deformed.
• Imaging these earthquakes and studying the previously unrecognized connectivity among the causative faults offers a rare window into the types of earthquakes that can occur, including how large and how often.