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- Title
Distributed and localized faulting in extensional settings: Insight from the North Ethiopian Rift-Afar transition area.
- Authors
Soliva, Roger; Schultz, Richard A.
- Abstract
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.
- Publication
Tectonics, 2008, Vol 27, Issue 2, pn/a
- ISSN
0278-7407
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1029/2007TC002148