Displacements and tilts from dip‐slip faults and magma chambers beneath irregular surface topography

Surface displacements and tilts due to buried deformation sources are influenced by topography. The leading-order corrections due to topography of arbitrary profile, but small slope, are determined for dip-slip faults (edge dislocations) and magma bodies (lines of inflation) in a two-dimensional elastic medium. The vertical displacement correction is simply the product of the topography and the horizontal normal strain due to the source in a flat half-space. The correction for a normal fault beneath an idealized basin-and-range topography is a slight increase in the uplift on the range side. The effect of topography for a line of inflation beneath a symmetric volcano is to reduce the central uplift. Failure to account for topographic influences can bias estimates of source depth and geometry.