ROUGH FAULT project : Roughness of active fault planes

Roughness of active fault planes : from silent slip to fault mechanics.

In this ANR Young Researcher project (F. Renard, C. Voisin, E. Larose, M.-L. Doan) we seek to understand how the morphology of fault surfaces can control the dynamics of ruptures and the stress state on large active faults.

Several doctoral students (Thibault Candela, Soumaya Latour, Dimitri Zigone) and a post-doctoral fellow, Andrew Rathbun, are participating in this project. Other collaborators included Luiza Angheluta, Joachim Mathiesen, Karen Mair, Michel Bouchon, David Marsan, Jean Schmittbuhl and Emily Brodsky.

We carry out field studies to measure the morphology of these faults, we carry out friction laboratory experiments and carry out numerical and analytical simulations.

We have also put online a database of the morphology of fault surfaces and earthquake surface ruptures. The data can be accessed here : FaultSurfaceData.

References

Renard, F., Beauprêtre, S., Zigone, D., Candela, T., Dysthe, D.K., Gratier, J.-P., and Voisin, C. (2012) Strength evolution of a reactive frictional interface is controlled by the dynamics of contacts and chemical effects, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, in press.

Renard, F., Mair, K., and Gundersen, O. (2012) Surface roughness evolution on experimentally simulated faults, Journal of Structural Geology, doi:10.1016/j.jsg.2012.03.009.

Latour, S., Gallot, T., Catheline, S., Voisin, C., Renard, F., Larose, E., and Campillo, M. (2011) Ultrafast ultrasonic imaging of dynamic sliding friction in soft solids : the slow slip and the super-shear regimes, Europhysics Letters, 96, 59003, doi : 10.1209/0295-5075/96/59003.

Candela, T., Renard, F., Bouchon, M., Schmittbuhl, J., and Brodsky, E. E. (2011) Fault slip distribution and fault roughness, Geophysical Journal International, 187, 959-968, doi : 10.1111/j.1365-246X.2011.05189.x.

Angheluta, L., Candela, T., Mathiesen, J. and Renard, F. (2011) Effect of surface morphology on the dissipation during shear and slip along a rock-rock interface that contains a visco-elastic core, Pure and Applied Geophysics, doi 10.1007/s00024-011-0272-8.

Candela, T., Renard, F., Bouchon, M., Schmittbuhl, J. and Brodsky, E. E. (2011) Stress drop during earthquakes : effect of fault roughness scaling, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 101, 2369-2387, doi : 10.1785/0120100298.

Zigone, D., Voisin, C., Larose, E., Renard, F., and Campillo, M. (2011) Slip acceleration generates tremor like signals in friction experiments, Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2010GL045603.

Angheluta, L., Mathiesen, J., Misbah, C., and Renard, F. (2010) Morphological instabilities of stressed and reactive geological interfaces, Journal of Geophysical Research, 115, B06406, doi:10.1029/2009JB006880.

Candela, T., Renard, F., Bouchon, M., Brouste, A., Marsan, D., Schmittbuhl, J., and Voisin, C. (2009) Characterization of fault roughness at various scales : Implications of three-dimensional high resolution topography measurements, Pure and Applied Geophysics, 166, 1817-1851, doi 10.1007/s00024-009-0521-2.

Voisin, C., Grasso, J.-R., Larose, E., and Renard, F. (2008) Seismic signals and slip patterns down dip subduction zones : insights from a lab scale experiment, Geophysical Research Letters, 35, L08302, doi:10.1029/2008GL033356.

Voisin, C., Renard, F., and Grasso, J.-R. (2007) Long term friction : from stick-slip to stable sliding, Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L13301, doi:10.1029/2007GL029715.

Mair, K., Renard, F., and Gundersen, O. (2006) Thermal imaging on simulated faults during frictional sliding, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L19301, doi:10.1029/2006GL027143.

Renard, F., Voisin, C., Marsan, D., and Schmittbuhl, J. (2006) High resolution 3D laser scanner measurements of a strike-slip fault quantify its morphological anisotropy at all scales, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L04305, doi:10.1029/2005GL025038.