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An earthquake is the shaking of the surface of Earth resulting from a sudden release of energy in the lithosphere that creates seismic waves.Earthquakes may also be referred to as quakes, tremors, or temblors.
A fault plane is the plane that represents the fracture surface of a fault. A fault trace or fault line is a place where the fault can be seen or mapped on the surface. A fault trace is also the line commonly plotted on geologic maps to represent a fault. [3] [4] A fault zone is a cluster of parallel faults.
The point at which fault slipping begins is referred to as the focus of the earthquake. [8] The fault rupture begins at the focus and then expands along the fault surface. The rupture stops where the stresses become insufficient to continue breaking the fault (because the rocks are stronger) or where the rupture enters ductile material. [8]
An active fault is a fault that is likely to become the source of another earthquake sometime in the future. Geologists commonly consider faults to be active if there has been movement observed or evidence of seismic activity during the last 10,000 years. [1] Active faulting is considered to be a geologic hazard – one related to earthquakes as
A thrust fault is a type of reverse fault, in which the rock above the fault is displaced upwards relative to the rock below the fault. This distinguishes reverse faults from normal faults , where the rock above the fault is displaced downwards, or strike-slip faults , where the rock on one side of the fault is displaced horizontally with ...
As illustrated, an earthquake zone may start as a single crack, growing to form many individual cracks and collections of cracks along a fault. The key to fault growth is the concept of a "following force", as conveniently provided for interplate earthquakes, by the motion of tectonic plates. Under a following force, the seismic displacements ...
Seismic faults are seismically active geologic faults. This is a category of all geologic faults which may be seismically active and cause earthquakes or be long inactive. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Faults .
A tectonic earthquake begins by an initial rupture at a point on the fault surface, a process known as nucleation. The scale of the nucleation zone is uncertain, with some evidence, such as the rupture dimensions of the smallest earthquakes, suggesting that it is smaller than 100 m while other evidence, such as a slow component revealed by low-frequency spectra of some earthquakes, suggest ...