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Geomorphological signature of the fault slip behavior: Analog and numerical modeling
Geomorphological signature of the fault slip behavior: Analog and numerical modeling
Collaborations: R. Cattin (postdoc advisor and project manager), S. Dominguez, C. Garcia-Estève (supervised Master student, now Ph.D. student) and all participants in the ANR project TOPOextreme.
Grants :
National Research Agency and CNRS Postdoctoral Fellowship, France, 2020
Project : TOPOextreme.
I worked on this topic in the frame of the ANR project "TOPOextreme" and a CNRS postdoctoral fellowships.
The aim here is to investigate the feedbacks between river high-discharge events and earthquake cycle deformation, which are the elementary driving processes linking climate, tectonics, and landscapes. Among the questions addressed in the project, I mostly expect to answer the following ones:
What are the landscape responses to the various fault slip behavior? To address this question, we developed an analog and numerical models of alluvial fans crossed by an active thrust fault. We compare the geomorphological characteristics evolution between experiments/simulations performed with a continuous creeping aseismic fault and experiments providing incremental earthquake-like events. See the abstract of our paper below.
Find the description of the ANR project here.
Take a look to some lab pictures here.
Find our paper below and here.
Garcia-Estève, C., Caniven, Y., Cattin, R., Dominguez, S., Sylvain, R. (2021). Morphotectonic Evolution of an Alluvial Fan: Results of a Joint Analog and Numerical Modeling Approach. Geosciences., 11(10):412. https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences11100412
Analog modeling of an alluvial fan crossed by an active thrust fault and photogrammetric analysis (Géosciences Montpellier Lab, France, 2020).
Numerical simulations using the Landlab2.0 modeling toolkit (Garcia-Estève et al., 2021)
Abstract: Surface topography results from complex couplings and feedbacks between tectonics and surface processes. We combine analog and numerical modeling, sharing similar geometry and boundary conditions, to assess the topographic evolution of an alluvial fan crossed by an active thrust fault. This joint approach allows the calibration of critical parameters constraining the river deposition–incision laws, such as the settling velocity of suspended sediments, the bed-rock erodibility, or the slope exponent. Comparing analog and numerical models reveals a slope-dependent threshold process, where a critical slope of ca. 0.081 controls the temporal evolution of the drainage network. We only evidence minor topographic differences between stable and stick-slip fault behavior localized along the fault scarp. Although this topographic signature may increase with the slip rate and the return period of slip events, it remains slight compared to the cumulated displacement along the fault scarp. Our results demonstrate that the study of morphology cannot be used alone to study the slip mode of active faults but can be a valuable tool complementing stratigraphic and geodetic observations. In contrast, we underline the significant signature of the distance between the fault and the sediment source, which controls the degree of channels incision and the density of the drainage network.
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