2014 M=6.0 South Napa earthquake triggered widespread aftershocks and stressed several major faults and exotic fault clusters

Seismological Research Letters
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Abstract

The strongest San Francisco Bay area earthquake since the 1989 Mw 7.0 Loma Prieta shock struck near Napa on 24 August 2014. Field mapping (Dawson et al., 2014; Earthquake Engineering Research Institute [EERI], 2014; Brocher et al., 2015) and seismic and geodetic source inversions (Barnhart et al., 2015; Dreger et al., 2015; Wei et al., 2015) indicate that a 15-km-long northwest-trending section of the West Napa Valley fault ruptured in the earthquake. Remarkably, it was the first indisputable surface rupture in the Bay area since 1906. The Napa event, along with other smaller earthquakes such as the 1980 Mw 5.8 Livermore and 1984 Mw 6.2 Morgan Hill events on the Calaveras and Hayward faults over the past 3–4 decades, may indicate that the Bay area region is emerging from the stress shadow of the 1906 Mw 7.8 San Francisco earthquake (Harris and Simpson, 1998; Pollitz et al., 2004). Since 1979, there has been a 140% increase in the rate of Mw≥4.1 shocks (Fig. 1) in the broader Bay area, with most concentrated in a corridor extending north from the 1989 Loma Prieta aftershock zone through the Calaveras, Greenville, Green Valley, Napa, and Rodgers Creek faults east of the San Francisco Bay (Fig. 1a). This corridor roughly coincides with the 1906 stress shadow that is being eroded away by more than a century of stress reaccumulation. The Napa event, as well as the surrounding faults on which we calculate the resulting hazard increases, all lie within this zone.

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Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title 2014 M=6.0 South Napa earthquake triggered widespread aftershocks and stressed several major faults and exotic fault clusters
Series title Seismological Research Letters
DOI 10.1785/0220150102
Volume 86
Issue 6
Year Published 2015
Language English
Publisher American Geophysical Union
Contributing office(s) Earthquake Science Center
Description 10 p.
First page 1593
Last page 1602
Country United States
State California
City San Francisco
Other Geospatial San Francisco Bay
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