Distributed and localized faulting in extensional settings: Insight from the North Ethiopian Rift-Afar transition area - Archive ouverte HAL
Article Dans Une Revue Tectonics Année : 2008

Distributed and localized faulting in extensional settings: Insight from the North Ethiopian Rift-Afar transition area

Résumé

Extensional fault systems in the Earth's crust can exhibit two end-member geometries that we identify as distributed and localized faulting regimes. A satellite image analysis of fault populations from the Main Ethiopian Rift-Afar area reveals that the rift architecture contains these two faulting regimes. The occurrence of these regimes reveals a jump in the scale of fault segmentation and linkage. Strain localization at rift border zones exhibits particularly large-scale fault linkage and a power law size distribution. This regime replaces prior distributed fault systems, showing small-scale fault linkage and an exponential size distribution. The distributed faulting is interpreted as confined to the thick trap basalt carapace. We show that continental fault systems can develop by a combination of these two geometries, and we demonstrate how to quantitatively decipher the jump between them.
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Dates et versions

hal-00411147 , version 1 (29-04-2021)

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Citer

Roger Soliva, R. A. Schultz. Distributed and localized faulting in extensional settings: Insight from the North Ethiopian Rift-Afar transition area. Tectonics, 2008, 27 (2), pp.TC2003. ⟨10.1029/2007TC002148⟩. ⟨hal-00411147⟩
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