Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2014. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 41 (2014): 7080–7088, doi:10.1002/2014GL061555.
Description:
Long-lived detachment faults play an important role in the construction of new oceanic crust at slow-spreading mid-oceanic ridges. Although the corrugated surfaces of exposed low-angle faults demonstrate past slip, it is difficult to determine whether a given fault is currently active. If inactive, it is unclear when slip ceased. This judgment is crucial for tectonic reconstructions where detachment faults are present, and for models of plate spreading. We quantify variation in sediment thickness over two corrugated surfaces near 16.5°N at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge using near-bottom Compressed High Intensity Radar Pulse (CHIRP) data. We show that the distribution of sediment and tectonic features at one detachment fault is consistent with slip occurring today. In contrast, another corrugated surface 20 km to the south shows a sediment distribution suggesting that slip ceased ~150,000 years ago. Data presented here provide new evidence for active detachment faulting, and suggest along-axis variations in fault activity occur over tens of kilometers.
Description:
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation grant number OCE-1155650.
Description:
2015-04-23
Keywords:
Mid-ocean ridge
;
Detachment faulting
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/msword
Format:
application/pdf
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