New article on stress inversions
In a new paper, I, Eric Beaucé, and Orlando Teran show that nodal plane orientation diversity is critical to reliable earthquake focal mechanism stress inversions.
Read MoreMy new family name
My surname is changing from Lund Snee to Lundstern. So, how does this impact you? Although I’ll start going by Lundstern right away in my personal life, my transition for professional matters will be slower. For one thing, many of my already published works will continue to list Lund Snee, J.-E. as an author. Please cite papers by the author name listed on the online version if possible. I hope this post resolves future confusion (say, for someone wondering why I seem to have two different names in different places).
Read MoreThe bravery of Russian antiwar protesters
News media photos from the last few days showing Russians protesting a pointless and illegal war.
Read MoreNew study tracks changes to stability of faults associated with Fort Worth Basin earthquakes
A new study by Peter Hennings and others shows how changes in subsurface fluid pressure due to industrial activities changed the stability of faults in the Fort Worth Basin over the past decade and a half. The work finds that pressure increased steadily on the faults responsible for most of the region’s recent earthquakes, making them less stable over time. The seismicity was associated with quite small pore pressure increases—the largest increase on any fault was less than 1.1 MPa (~160 psi).
Read MoreKinematics of M6.0 July 2021 Eastern California earthquake as expected within the mapped stress field
Sometimes, an earthquake occurs somewhere with limited historical data, and its focal mechanism reveals something unexpected about the stress field. The M6.0 Antelope Valley event that occurred on the 8th of July this year near Markleeville, CA, in the Eastern Sierra, is not one of those. The normal and strike-slip faulting focal mechanisms of the event and its aftershocks, with fault strikes consistent with the maximum horizontal stress (SHmax) being nearly north–south, are exactly what would be expected for that area.
Read MoreMagnitude 5.0 earthquake shakes West Texas
The earthquake was the region’s largest in decades and the most significant in the central and eastern USA since 2016. Slip appears to have occurred on a fault well-aligned with the mapped stress field. The cause is not currently known, but oil & gas operations were active in the immediate area.
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