Elastic Contrast, Rupture Directivity, and Damage Asymmetry in an
Anisotropic Bimaterial Strike-Slip Fault at Middle Crustal Depths
Abstract
Mature faults with large cumulative slip often separate rocks with
dissimilar elastic properties and show asymmetric damage distribution.
Elastic contrast across such bimaterial faults can significantly modify
various aspects of earthquake rupture dynamics, including normal stress
variations, rupture propagation direction, distribution of ground
motions, and evolution of off-fault damage. Thus, analyzing elastic
contrasts of bimaterial faults is important for understanding earthquake
physics and related hazard potential. The effect of elastic contrast
between isotropic materials on rupture dynamics is relatively well
studied. However, most fault rocks are elastically anisotropic, and
little is known about how the anisotropy affects rupture dynamics. We
examine microstructures of the Sandhill Corner shear zone, which
separates quartzofeldspathic rock and micaceous schist with wider and
narrower damage zones, respectively. This shear zone is part of the
Norumbega fault system, a Paleozoic, large-displacement, seismogenic,
strike-slip fault system exhumed from mid-crustal depths. We calculate
elastic properties and seismic wave speeds of elastically anisotropic
rocks from each unit having different proportions of mica grains aligned
sub-parallel to the fault. Our findings show that the horizontally
polarized shear wave propagating parallel to the bimaterial fault (with
fault-normal particle motion) is the slowest owing to the fault-normal
compliance and therefore may be important in determining the elastic
contrast that affects rupture dynamics in anisotropic media. Following
results from subshear rupture propagation models in isotropic media, our
results are consistent with ruptures preferentially propagated in the
slip direction of the schist, which has the slower horizontal shear wave
and larger fault-normal compliance.