Coexisting seismic behavior of transform faults revealed by high-resolution bathymetry

Transform faults are known to have anomalously low rates of seismicity, but no direct observations reveal why this is the case. We use new, autonomous underwater vehicle high-resolution seafloor mapping to image the morphology of and offsets along transform fault segments in the Gulf of California. Fault splays display a varied history of activation and deactivation of individual fault strands over time, not unlike those mapped onshore or imaged within the bathymetry of the Queen Charlotte-Fairweather and the Palos Verdes faults of offshore western Canada and Southern California. A series of six identically offset depositional fans evidence 21–23 meters of slip along the main transform fault, which could not have been produced by a single earthquake. Rather, the lack of smaller-magnitude offsets indicates synchronous deposition and an absence of multiple slope failure-inducing earthquakes, thus providing the first direct evidence that creep and earthquakes occur at different times in the slip history of a given transform fault segment.