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Spatiotemporal Variations of Stress in the Crust Near 2019 Ridgecrest Sequence Earthquakes

Session: Crustal Stress and Strain and Implications for Fault Interaction and Slip [Poster]

Type: Poster

Date: 4/22/2021

Presentation Time: 11:30 AM Pacific

Description: 

Advances in geodetic and seismic data acquisition, analysis methods, and computational capabilities allow spatiotemporal estimations of stress in high-resolution in the Earth’s crust. Geodetic imaging observations of surface displacements provide information on the crustal deformation and strain variations within the earthquake cycle (i.e., interseismic, coseismic, and postseismic), and can be used to model for the stress distribution. Whereas, seismicity provides detailed information on failures within the seismogenic zone. In this study, we use interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) to measure the postseismic surface deformation and infer afterslip on faults near or in the main coseismic ruptures from the Ridgecrest sequence between 2019-2020. The Caltech-JPL Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis (ARIA) project has been systematically processing InSAR data from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites, and include data every 6 and 12 days over the Ridgecrest area. Moreover, we examine the associated stress field inverting the seismic data and estimate the 4D spatiotemporal stress field variations to compare it to the afterslip estimates. The ultimate goal is detecting zones with higher stress accumulations that are potential for seismic hazard. Further research will improve the understanding of deformation processes, fault mechanics, fault system interactions, and rheology of the lithosphere and enhance our knowledge on long term earthquake forecasting.

Presenting Author: Niloufar Abolfathian

Student Presenter: No

Authors