beachballs-stress-change

Three maps with colored beachballs

This unfortunately complex figure highlights the messiness of real-world faults, which come in all sizes, orientations and depths. Our calculations (Toda and Stein, 2020) attempt to capture this complexity. So, we use background focal mechanisms (the beachballs) from earthquakes greater than magnitude-4.0 since 1997 from the F-Net catalog of NIED to represent active faults, rather than simplified or idealized fault surfaces (following Hardebeck et al., 1998). Red beachballs are brought closer to failure and blue beachballs farther from failure. Each panel shows the impact of one (black) quake on its surroundings.

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