Slip heterogeneity on a corrugated fault

Abstract Slip heterogeneity reflects the fundamental physics of earthquake rupture and has been attributed to strong fault patches termed asperities or barriers. We propose that variations in fault-surface orientation due to slip-parallel corrugations may act as geometric asperities and barriers, generating variations in incremental (i.e. due to a single earthquake) slip across a fault surface. We evaluate this hypothesis using observations from the Arkitsa normal fault exposure in central Greece. A scan of the Arkitsa fault surface with 1-m spatial resolution and mm-scale precision reveals corrugations made up of 1–5 m wide synforms, antiforms, and nearly planar fault sections with long axes that extend in the slip direction across the entire exposed surface. The surface is thus more than an order of magnitude smoother in the direction of slip than in the perpendicular direction. Slip-perpendicular profiles exhibit nearly self-similar scaling across the range of observed wavelengths (~ 2–50 m), whereas slip-parallel profiles are significantly smoother at shorter wavelengths (

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