Elastic and Viscoelastic Models of Crust Deformation in Strike-slip Fault

Abstract

The crust, when viewed over a long period, moves towards one another. Crusts might experience sudden slip on a fault plane and caused fractures or cracks. There are three different types of faults, normal, reverse, and strike-slip faults. Induced stress due to sudden rupture on fault planes capable of creating stress and need to be measured quantitatively to comprehend the earthquake process. To understand the stress that occurs in strike-slip faults in the earth’s crust, the previous researchers study the use of elastic materials as the material of the earth’s crust, so that the earth crust’s deformation is elastic. However, elastic material has linear stress and strain relationship that results in reversible deformations or returns to their original shape. This material is not suitable for modeling the earth’s crust’s long-term deformation, where the deformation of the earth’s crust can be permanent, so a model is needed to solve this problem. In this study, we will compare the stress in the strike-slip fault in the upper crust with elastic materials, while the lower crust and upper mantle have viscoelastic materials compared to purely elastic materials through numerical simulations. This comparison is made to see the comparison between the two approaches with the earth’s layers’ actual state. The two models is chosen to represent the different failure processes of the earth crust, i.e. the elastic deformation part describes the response to stress in a short period, and the viscous deformation can explain the response over a more extended period. The study of both materials above is based on plate tectonic theory, in which the lithosphere plates will relatively move to each other because the layer material underneath is solid but can flow like a liquid for a long period.