2022 Crustal Deformation Modeling Workshop Report

The 2022 Crustal Deformation Modeling Workshop was held June 20–24 at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. The workshop included two days of tutorials on the use of the open-source software PyLith for crustal deformation modeling followed by three days of science talks and discussions. The workshop focused on three primary themes: (1) Earthquake cycle modeling; (2) Inversions for fault slip; and (3) Faulting, fluids, and surface loading.

The talks highlighted how computational models provide insight into intriguing observations of Earth and planetary behavior. These included (1) earthquake synchronization of rupture patches due to their close proximity to each other, (2) the influence of fault geometry and damage zones on hypocenter depth and rupture propagation, (3) a lack of steady-state faulting behavior due to long time scales for grain size evolution in the mid-crust, (4) crustal deformation due to tidal, hydrological, and atmospheric loads, and (5) plumes of gas and icy particles due to tidal driven faulting on Enceladus (one of Saturn’s moons). The talks also described new computational modeling capabilities for incorporating complex geologic structure into Bayesian inversions for fault slip and efficient implementation of earthquake cycle models using a symmetric interior discontinuous Galerkin method. The complete agenda is available on the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamic (CIG) website.