Analysis of fault slip inversions: Do they constrain stress or strain rate?

Abstract

Fault slip data commonly are used to infer the orientations and relative magnitudes of either the principal stresses or the principal strain rates, which are not necessarily parallel or equal. At the local scale of an individual fault, the shear plane and slip direction define the orientations of the local principal strain rate axes but not, in general, the local principal stress axes. At a large scale, the orientations of P and T axes maxima for sets of fault slip data do not provide accurate inversion solutions for either strain rate or stress. The quantitative inversion of such fault slip data, however, provides direct constraints on the orientations and relative magnitudes of the global principal strain rates. To interpret the inversion solution as constraining the global principal stresses requires that (1) the fault slip pattern must have a characteristic symmetry no lower than orthorhombic; (2) the material must be mechanically isotropic; and (3) there must be a linear constitutive relationship between the global stress and the global strain rate. Isotropic linear elastic constitutive equations are appropriate to describe the local deformation surrounding an individual slip discontinuity. Fault slip inversions, however, constrain the characteristics of a large‐scale cataclastic flow, which is described by constitutive equations that are probably, but to an unknown degree, anisotropic and nonlinear. Such material behavior would not strictly satisfy the requirements for the stress interpretation. Thus, at the present state of knowledge, fault slip inversion solutions are most reliably interpreted as constraining the principal strain rates.