G21A-1005
Is there a "blind" strike-slip fault at the southern end of the San Jacinto Fault system?

Tuesday, 15 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Ekaterina Tymofyeyeva1 and Yuri A Fialko1,2, (1)University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States, (2)Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, La Jolla, CA, United States
Abstract:
We have studied the interseismic deformation at the southern end of the San Jacinto fault system using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) and Global Positioning System (GPS) data. To complement the continuous GPS measurements from the PBO network, we have conducted campaign-style GPS surveys of 19 benchmarks along Highway 78 in the years 2012, 2013, and 2014. We processed the campaign GPS data using GAMIT to obtain horizontal velocities. The data show high velocity gradients East of the surface trace of the Coyote Creek Fault. We also processed InSAR data from the ascending and descending tracks of the ENVISAT mission between the years 2003 and 2010. The InSAR data were corrected for atmospheric artifacts using an iterative common point stacking method. We combined average velocities from different look angles to isolate the fault-parallel velocity field, and used fault-parallel velocities to compute strain rate. We filtered the data over a range of wavelengths prior to numerical differentiation, to reduce the effects of noise and to investigate both shallow and deep sources of deformation. At spatial wavelengths less than 2km the strain rate data show prominent anomalies along the San Andreas and Superstition Hills faults, where shallow creep has been documented by previous studies. Similar anomalies are also observed along parts of the Coyote Creek Fault, San Felipe Fault, and an unmapped southern continuation of the Clark strand of the San Jacinto Fault. At wavelengths on the order of 20km, we observe elevated strain rates concentrated east of the Coyote Creek Fault. The long-wavelength strain anomaly east of the Coyote Creek Fault, and the localized shallow creep observed in the short-wavelength strain rate data over the same area suggest that there may be a "blind" segment of the Clark Fault that accommodates a significant portion of the deformation on the southern end of the San Jacinto Fault.