Geometry of Active Faults and Their Rupture Process

摘要

Physical characteristics are often used for fault segmentation, when historical and/or paleoseismological data are not sufficient to reveal coseismic behavior of faults. This paper proposes a method to identify the di- rectivity of rupture propagation based on the branching features of active fault traces. An interdependent correlation between the branching direction of the surface ruptures and the direction of their propagation is often observed for recent earthquake fault ruptures.