Evolution of fault activity reflecting the crustal deformation: Insights from crustal stress and fault orientations in the northeast–southwest Japan

Abstract:

We evaluated fault activity in northeast– southwest Japan based on the regional stress and the fault orientation field for both active faults and inactive faults (here, an inactive fault is a fault which activity has not been identified in Quaternary). The regional stress field was calculated using the stress inversion method [Hardebeck and Michael, 2006] applied to earthquake focal mechanisms in the northeast–southwest Japan. The locations and orientations (i.e., strike and dip, assuming a planar fault geometry) of active faults in the study area were obtained from the Active Fault Database of Japan and inactive faults from a database compiled by Kosaka et al. [2011]. We employed slip tendency analysis [Morris et al., 1996] to evaluate the likelihood of fault slip. The values of the slip tendency is generally higher along active faults than along inactive faults. The difference between the slip tendencies of active and inactive faults reflects the difference in their activities. Furthermore the high slip tendency observed for some inactive faults suggests their high activity. These high slip tendencies imply that they have potential to be active. We propose the temporal evolution from inactive to active faulting during long-term crustal deformation to explain the potential for fault activity along inactive faults. When a region undergoes the transition from inactive to active faulting, potential active faults are observed as inactive faults with a high Part of this findig have been submitted to Tectonics (AGU Journal) (2015-07-27). We will presentate some new findings.slip tendency. The average slip tendency of inactive faults gradually increases from northeast to southwest Japan, because a relatively large number of inactive faults in southwest Japan have a high slip tendency. The representative deformation zones in Japan shows a relationship with the observed spatial variations in the evolution from inactive to active faulting. This study was supported by MEXT KAKENHI (26109003).