Earth surface effects on active faults: An eigenvalue asymptotic analysis

Abstract

We study in this paper an eigenvalue problem (of Steklov type), modeling slow slip events (such as silent earthquakes, or earthquake nucleation phases) occurring on geological faults. We focus here on a half space formulation with traction free boundary condition: this simulates the earth surface where displacements take place and can be picked up by GPS measurements. We construct an appropriate functional framework attached to a formulation suitable for the half space setting. We perform an asymptotic analysis of the solution with respect to the depth of the fault. Starting from an integral representation for the displacement field, we prove that the differences between the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions attached to the half space problem and those attached to the free space problem, is of the order of d - 2 , where d is a depth parameter: intuitively, this was expected as this is also the order of decay of the derivative of the Green's function for our problem. We actually prove faster decay in case of symmetric faults. For all faults, we rigorously obtain a very useful asymptotic formula for the surface displacement, whose dominant part involves a so called seismic moment. We also provide results pertaining to the analysis of the multiplicity of the first eigenvalue in the line segment fault case. Finally we explain how we derived our numerical method for solving for dislocations on faults in the half plane. It involves integral equations combining regular and Hadamard's hypersingular integration kernels.