Structural Architecture of the Western Transverse Ranges and Potential for Large Earthquakes

Abstract:

Understanding the subsurface structure of the Western Transverse Ranges (WTR) is critical to assess the seismic potential of large thrust faults comprising this fold-and-thrust belt. Several models have been advanced over the years, building on new data and understandings of thrust belt architecture, but none of these efforts have incorporated the full range of data, including style and rates of late Quaternary deformation in conjunction with surface geology, sub-surface well data and offshore seismic data. In our models, we suggest that the nearly continuous backbone with continuous stratigraphy of the Santa Ynez Mountains is explained by a large anticlinorium over a deep structural ramp, and that the current thrust front is defined by the southward-vergent Pitas Point-Ventura fault. The Ventura Avenue anticline and trend is an actively deforming fault propagation fold over the partially blind Pitas Point-Ventura fault. Details of how this fault is resolved to the surface are not well constrained, but any deformation model must account for the several back-thrusts that ride in the hanging wall of the thrust sheet, as well as the localized subsidence in Carpenteria and offshore Santa Barbara. Our preliminary starting model is a modification of a recently published model that invokes ramp-flat structure, with a deep ramp under the Santa Ynez Mountains, a shallower “flat” with considerable complexity in the hanging wall and a frontal ramp comprising the San Cayetano and Pitas Point thrusts. With the inferred deep ramp under the Santa Ynez Range, this model implies that large earthquakes may extend the entire length of the anticlinorium from Point Conception to eastern Ventura Basin, suggesting that the potential for a large earthquake is significantly higher then previously assumed.