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Decoding earthquake mechanics with repeat pass airborne lidar

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 4, page 355 (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).

The number of earthquakes imaged with differential lidar data is currently restricted to seven (Iwate–Miyagi, Japan in 2008; Darfield, 2010; El Mayor Cucapah, Mexico in 2010; Fukushima–Hamadori, Japan in 2011; Napa, California in 2014; Kumamoto, Japan in 2016 and Kaikoura, New Zealand in 2016), owing to the lack of pre-earthquake datasets. For many of these events, the pre-earthquake lidar datasets are only partial in extent, so differencing was only possible for a portion of the surface deformation field. Nevertheless, differential lidar has been used to image subtle long-wavelength deformation, the width around the fault where the rock yielded during the earthquake, and small rotations of decreasing intensity with distance away from the fault. Differential topography has also been used to image the creep along the central San Andreas fault, revealing a relationship between geometrical complexity and creep rates on the fault. Existing and planned lidar surveys, which are rapidly extending beyond the United States, continue to increase the likelihood that the next surface rupturing earthquake, or other creeping faults, will be captured with differential topography, providing new opportunities for understanding fault mechanics.

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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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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 4, 355 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-023-00430-z

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