Southern San Andreas Fault

Southern San Andreas Fault

Chelsea Scott (ASU) and I are super excited that our high-resolution topography of the Southern San Andreas Fault from Painted Cave to Bombay Beach (40 km of fault length) is now publicly available on OpenTopography. Vicki Lee (VT) and Brigham Whitney (recent UVU grad) deserve big kudos for their help with the fieldwork on this project, and of course OpenTopography deserves a big shout-out for being such a fantastic resource. This contribution is by far the largest dataset on OpenTopography that was generated using sUAS (small drones) and structure-from-motion methods. Here is the link to the data release https://opentopography.org/news/new-sfm-data-over-southern-san-andreas-fault-ca and here is a link to directly access the data, https://doi.org/10.5069/G94M92RG

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The Southern San Andreas Fault, in the Imperial Valley, has been quiescent for longer than any section of the San Andreas Fault and consequently is considered most likely to make the next major, surface-rupturing earthquake on the San Andreas. In 2020 Chelsea Scott and I, with able help from Vicki Lee and Brigham Whitney, used a Sensefly eBee Plus to fly ~40 km of the fault to generate digital high resolution topography of the fault. We completed the field work in 3.5 days, exceeding our expectations for coverage. The data are available as a point cloud, digital surface model, and orthomosaic on OpenTopography (https://doi.org/10.5069/G94M92RG). We hope this work will be a useful contribution that helps research on the southern San Andreas, and we see it as a test-run and example of the potential for rapid acquisition of high resolution topography following a surface-rupturing earthquake, including the potential for repeat post-event surveys to record after-slip.

I and UVU students Jack Wells & Jeremy Andreini also worked with Dr. Susanne Janecke of Utah State University making drone surveys of portions of the Southern San Andreas Fault in 2016.