Home▸Climate, Ecology & Environment▸Earthquake Rupture on a 2D Fault Plane: Along-Strike vs Down-Dip Arrest

Earthquake Rupture on a 2D Fault Plane: Along-Strike vs Down-Dip Arrest

A quasi-dynamic slip-weakening fault model on a full 2D fault plane (along-strike x down-dip depth): watch a rupture nucleate mid-depth and spread outward, arrested down-dip by the brittle-ductile transition while it keeps racing along strike — sometimes past the shear-wave speed into supershear.

Climate, Ecology & Environment2DAdvanced60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted⇄ 3D version

This is the 2-D fault-plane counterpart to the 1-D fault-chain rupture model: instead of a single line of patches, the fault here is a full grid spanning along-strike position and down-dip depth, each patch elastically coupled to four neighbours and obeying the same slip-weakening friction law. Strength is boosted near the surface and near the base of the seismogenic zone, so a nucleating rupture is free to race along strike — sometimes fast enough to cross the shear-wave speed into supershear — while its down-dip growth is naturally throttled and arrested well inside the grid, exactly the elongated, strike-parallel rupture geometry real earthquakes show and that a 1-D chain has no way to reproduce.

⚙ Under the hood

The genuine 2D counterpart to the fault-chain rupture model: a full along-strike x down-dip grid of slip-weakening patches, elastically coupled to four neighbours, where depth-dependent strength arrests down-dip growth while the rupture keeps racing along strike — sometimes past the shear-wave speed into supershear.

earthquakefault ruptureseismologyslip-weakeningsupersheargeophysics2D fault plane

2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install