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Decoding earthquake mechanics with repeat pass airborne lidar

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment (2023)Cite this article

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Large earthquakes cause substantial amounts of surface deformation in their wake. Fault scarps, sometimes meters in height and 10s–100s kilometers long, occur where the fault ruptures the surface. Fractures and subtle buckling extend for kilometers either side of the fault. This surface deformation captures essential information about how earthquakes modify the material properties of the Earth’s crust around faults. Distributed deformation also hints at the physics of how earthquakes propagate from their nucleation point at depth to the surface where shaking is felt. Measuring the complete field of surface deformation produced by an earthquake requires technology capable of resolving displacements over several orders of magnitude (millimeters to up to >10 meters) occurring over a large spatial footprint (kilometers from and along the fault).

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks M. Oskin, R. Arrowsmith, and C. Scott for providing comments on the text. Lidar topography can be accessed via OpenTopography, a facility supported by the US National Science Foundation under NSF Award Numbers 1948997, 1948994 and 1948857.

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

    Alba M. Rodriguez Padilla

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  1. Alba M. Rodriguez Padilla
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Correspondence to Alba M. Rodriguez Padilla.

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Rodriguez Padilla, A.M. Decoding earthquake mechanics with repeat pass airborne lidar. Nat Rev Earth Environ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-023-00430-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-023-00430-z

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