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Accrual of widespread rock damage from the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes

Nature Geoscience volume 15, pages 222–226 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Inelastic processes from earthquakes contribute to the formation of fault damage zones that constitute a permanent sink of strain energy, modify the elastic properties of the shallow crust and amplify near-field ground shaking. Constraints on the extent of inelastic deformation differ depending on the dataset and methodology used. Here we combine fracture, strain and aftershock maps from the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes to reconcile the properties of damage zones across different spatial scales and resolutions. The decay of inelastic deformation with distance from the fault is well described by an inverse power law, extends beyond 20 km from the faults and is insensitive to lithology and slip magnitude. The damage decay is continuous without breaks in scaling, suggesting that a single mechanism dominates yielding. On the basis of our fracture density distribution, we predict an average reduction in shear rigidity of about 20% in bedrock and 40% in alluvium immediately adjacent to the fault, declining to less than 1% at 100 m. Our observations reveal how macroscopic fracturing generates intense near-fault damage and that widespread damage accrues regionally over multiple earthquake cycles.

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Fig. 1: Distribution of surficial fractures and aftershocks.
Fig. 2: Fracture density, aftershock density and strain intensity decay with fault-perpendicular distance.
Fig. 3: Decay of fracture density with fault slip and lithology.
Fig. 4: Decrease in shear rigidity as a result of coseismic fracturing.

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Data availability

The datasets generated in this manuscript are available for download from https://github.com/absrp/damage_datasets. All datasets used in this manuscript are open access. The foreshock UAV imagery from ref. 28 is available from https://doi.org/10.5069/G9KD1W2C. The mainshock UAV imagery is available from https://doi.org/10.5069/G9930RBB. The aerial photography and lidar data from ref. 25 are available from https://doi.org/10.5069/G9W0942Z. The Ridgecrest QTM earthquake catalogue is available from https://scedc.caltech.edu/data/qtm-ridgecrest.html. The SCSN catalogue is available from https://www.scsn.org/. The field- and geodesy-based rupture map from ref. 26 is available from https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/5d699da6e4b0c4f70cf2f936. The shapefile containing the high-resolution fracture maps from ref. 27 is available from https://sandbox.zenodo.org/record/902426#.YSAyW9NKiDU. The 3D representations of the fault planes from ref. 30 are available from the SCEC community fault model: https://www.scec.org/research/cfm.

Code availability

The code used to fit and analyse the data is available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the UCSC seismo lab and Y. Ben-Zion for helpful discussion. This research was supported by the Southern California Earthquake Center (contribution no. 10995). SCEC is funded by NSF Cooperative Agreement EAR-1600087 and USGS Cooperative Agreement G17AC00047. A.M.R.P is supported by NASA FINESST fellowship 20-EARTH20-0313.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

    Alba M. Rodriguez Padilla & Michael E. Oskin

  2. Seismological Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Christopher W. D. Milliner

  3. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Andreas Plesch

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Contributions

A.M.R.P mapped fractures from lidar data and prepared and processed the data for the damage decay analysis. M.E.O. and A.M.R.P computed the modulus decrease estimates. C.W.D.M. computed strain and generated the strain profiles. A.P. measured the distance between the aftershocks and the fault planes. All authors contributed to writing the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alba M. Rodriguez Padilla.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Christopher Scholz and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Rebecca Neely in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Stacked profiles of fault-parallel shear strain from satellite cross-correlated imagery.

Stacked profiles of fault-parallel shear strain from satellite cross-correlated imagery17. Each profile stacks horizontal fault-parallel displacement over a 138-meter window along strike. Strain is then calculated from the fault-parallel displacement profile over a 12-meter kernel across strike by taking the first derivative using a central-difference finite approximation.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Decay in aftershock density with fault-perpendicular distance for different depth intervals.

Top: Decay in aftershock density with fault-perpendicular distance for different depth intervals. The vertical lines represent the break in scaling d for each group of aftershocks. Bottom: Range of γ and d fits. The vertical lines represent the maximum likelihood value.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Maximum likelihood distribution of parameters in Eq. (1) for the distributions in Fig. 3 (main).

Top: Fit range (histograms) for parameters d and γ in Eq. (1) for the bedrock and sediment distributions in Fig. 3 of the manuscript. Bottom: fit range for parameters d and γ in Eq. (1) for zones 1 through 5 in Fig. 3 of the manuscript. The vertical lines represent the maximum likelihood value. The shaded orange section indicates the fault location uncertainty at the surface.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Distribution of fracture orientation with fault-perpendicular distance.

Distribution of fracture orientation with distance away from the fault for zones 1–5 from top to bottom (Fig. 3). Fractures are shown in color and faults are shown in grey. Fracture orientation abundances are normalized by the total number of fractures in the rose diagram.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Map view of fracture orientations at select locations.

Map view of fracture orientations. A, B, and C show the distribution of fractures through zones 1, 4, and 5 in Fig. 3. D and E show insets into regions of A and C to highlight variability along the rupture and organization of fractures at narrow angles from one another.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Strain and fracture density maps.

Strain and fracture density maps from high-resolution imagery for the middle of the foreshock (a and b) and the southern tip of the mainshock (c and d). Strain is calculated over a 12-meter kernel and fracture density is calculated over a 10 meter kernel.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–17 and derivation for equations (1)–(13).

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Rodriguez Padilla, A.M., Oskin, M.E., Milliner, C.W.D. et al. Accrual of widespread rock damage from the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes. Nat. Geosci. 15, 222–226 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00888-w

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