Interseismic and Postseismic Deformation and Stress Evolution: Effects of Rheology, Rupture History, and Fault System Geometry

智力优势：地球镜和相关活动即将提供来自许多学科的大量数据，这些数据涉及地壳如何在广泛的空间和时间尺度上变形。解释来自不同来源的数据（例如，应力测量、大地测量学、古地震学、结构地震学）在基本过程方面需要模型-概念模型和数值模型。 基于模型的地质，大地测量和地震时间尺度上的变形是如何相关的推断需要流变学，几何形状和地震的强迫的描述。 要使模型有用，它必须足够简单以便于理解，同时仍然足够现实。 模型预测的参数化越简单，模型就越有可能被用于建立对系统行为的直觉和理解。地球内部的岩石会通过各种机制变形，以响应与地震周期相关的应力和应力变化。震后和震间应变积累的大多数简单模型计算简单，广泛使用，指导社区直觉的发展，有很大的局限性。 这些假设包括：地壳流变行为的假设与地球物理学对瞬态蠕变重要性的观察相矛盾;地壳中的背景应力通常比同震应力变化大一个数量级或更多;地震几乎不会产生新的断层，但几乎总是在同一结构上发生许多以前的地震，地震几乎从来不是周期性的，很少破裂断层补丁足够大，以充分近似的无限长的断层破裂隐含在2D模型的粘弹性松弛。为了更好地了解地球过程，以及利用Earthscope的高质量数据进行大地测量，古地震学，应力测量和地震学，至关重要的是，大量的努力致力于改进我们的模型。 虽然最终需要进行大规模的计算工作，但在短期内（这对仪器的选址、指导更复杂方法的开发和现有数据的解释很重要），相对简单的模型-一些是分析模型，一些是数值模型-正在取得重大进展。 我们的目标是了解更现实的流变假设的重要性，提供有用的数值参数化，并使这种新的理解容易被更广泛的社区使用，例如，更广泛的影响：正在开发的工具可以实现地壳和上地幔的流变学描述，这些描述在材料科学方面具有改进的基础。 这些工具使科学家能够在广泛的时间尺度上解决地壳变形问题。 这一努力正在改进对与地震周期有关的过程的基于模型的推断，从而改进地震风险的量化，更好地了解地震的物理学，以及这些过程与地壳长期动态有关的过程之间的联系。 该项目为麻省理工学院的研究生提供了独特的教育经验，并包括与科学和社会相关的令人兴奋的研究的本科生。

Intellectual Merit: Earthscope and associated activities are about to provide an avalanche of data from many disciplines about how Earth's crust deforms on a wide range of space and time scales. Interpreting data from diverse sources (e.g., stress measurements, geodesy, paleoseismology, structural seismology) in terms of the underlying processes requires models - both conceptual and numerical. Model-based inference of how deformation on geologic, geodetic, and seismic time scales are related requires descriptions of the rheology, geometry, and forcing by earthquakes. To be useful, a model must be simple enough to understand, while still being sufficiently realistic. The more simply model predictions can be parameterized, the more likely it is that the model will be used in building intuition and understanding about how the system behaves.Rocks in Earth's interior deform by a wide range of mechanisms in response to the stresses and stress changes associated with the seismic cycle. Most of the simple models of postseismic and interseismic strain-accumulation that are straightforward to calculate and in wide-spread use, guiding the development of intuition by the community, have significant limitations. These include assumptions about the rheological behavior of the crust that contradict geophysical observations of the importance of transient creep, the reality that the background stress in the crust is typically an order of magnitude or more greater than coseismic stress changes, that earthquakes almost never create new faults, but are almost always preceded by many previous earthquakes on the same structures, and that earthquakes are almost never periodic and rarely rupture fault patches large enough to be adequately approximated by the infinitely long fault ruptures implicit in 2D models of viscoelastic relaxation. In order to gain better understanding of earth processes, as well as to take advantage of the high quality data from Earthscope for geodesy, paleoseismoogy, stress measurements, and seismology, it is crucial that substantial effort be devoted to improving our models. While ultimately a large-scale computational effort will be needed, in the short term (important for siting of instruments, guiding development of more sophisticated approaches, and interpretation of existing data), significant progress is being made with relatively simple models - some analytic, some numerical. The goal is to obtain understanding of the importance of more realistic rheological assumptions, to provide useful numerical parameterizations and to make this new understanding easily useable by the broader community, e.g., as Matlab codes, and as animations on the web.Broader Implications: Tools are being developed that implement rheological descriptions of the crust and upper mantle that have an improved basis in materials science. These tools allow scientists to address crustal deformation over a broad range of time scales. This effort is improving model-based inference of the processes associated with the seismic cycle, leading to improved quantification of seismic risk, better understanding of the physics of earthquakes, and a link between these processes and processes associated with longer-term dynamics of the crust. This project provides unique educational experience for MIT graduate students and includes undergraduates in exciting research of relevance to both science and society.