Causes of earthquakes

Earth’s major earthquakes occur mainly in belts coinciding with the margins of tectonic plates. This has long been apparent from early catalogs of felt earthquakes and is even more readily discernible in modern seismicity maps, which show instrumentally determined epicentres. The most important earthquake belt is the Circum-Pacific Belt, which affects many populated coastal regions around the Pacific Ocean—for example, those of New Zealand, New Guinea, Japan, the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and the western coasts of North and South America. It is estimated that 80 percent of the energy presently released in earthquakes comes from those whose epicentres are in this belt. The seismic activity is by no means uniform throughout the belt, and there are a number of branches at various points. Because at many places the Circum-Pacific Belt is associated with volcanic activity, it has been popularly dubbed the “Pacific Ring of Fire.”

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A second belt, known as the Alpide Belt, passes through the Mediterranean region eastward through Asia and joins the Circum-Pacific Belt in the East Indies. The energy released in earthquakes from this belt is about 15 percent of the world total. There also are striking connected belts of seismic activity, mainly along oceanic ridges—including those in the Arctic Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and the western Indian Ocean—and along the rift valleys of East Africa. This global seismicity distribution is best understood in terms of its plate tectonic setting.

Natural forces

Earthquakes are caused by the sudden release of energy within some limited region of the rocks of the Earth. The energy can be released by elastic strain, gravity, chemical reactions, or even the motion of massive bodies. Of all these the release of elastic strain is the most important cause, because this form of energy is the only kind that can be stored in sufficient quantity in the Earth to produce major disturbances. Earthquakes associated with this type of energy release are called tectonic earthquakes.

Tectonic earthquakes are explained by the so-called elastic rebound theory, formulated by the American geologist Harry Fielding Reid after the San Andreas Fault ruptured in 1906, generating the great San Francisco earthquake. According to the theory, a tectonic earthquake occurs when strains in rock masses have accumulated to a point where the resulting stresses exceed the strength of the rocks, and sudden fracturing results. The fractures propagate rapidly through the rock, usually tending in the same direction and sometimes extending many kilometres along a local zone of weakness. In 1906, for instance, the San Andreas Fault slipped along a plane 430 km (270 miles) long. Along this line the ground was displaced horizontally as much as 6 metres (20 feet).

As a fault rupture progresses along or up the fault, rock masses are flung in opposite directions and thus spring back to a position where there is less strain. At any one point this movement may take place not at once but rather in irregular steps; these sudden slowings and restartings give rise to the vibrations that propagate as seismic waves. Such irregular properties of fault rupture are now included in the modeling of earthquake sources, both physically and mathematically. Roughnesses along the fault are referred to as asperities, and places where the rupture slows or stops are said to be fault barriers. Fault rupture starts at the earthquake focus, a spot that in many cases is close to 5–15 km under the surface. The rupture propagates in one or both directions over the fault plane until stopped or slowed at a barrier. Sometimes, instead of being stopped at the barrier, the fault rupture recommences on the far side; at other times the stresses in the rocks break the barrier, and the rupture continues.

Earthquakes have different properties depending on the type of fault slip that causes them (as shown in the figure). The usual fault model has a “strike” (that is, the direction from north taken by a horizontal line in the fault plane) and a “dip” (the angle from the horizontal shown by the steepest slope in the fault). The lower wall of an inclined fault is called the footwall. Lying over the footwall is the hanging wall. When rock masses slip past each other parallel to the strike, the movement is known as strike-slip faulting. Movement parallel to the dip is called dip-slip faulting. Strike-slip faults are right lateral or left lateral, depending on whether the block on the opposite side of the fault from an observer has moved to the right or left. In dip-slip faults, if the hanging-wall block moves downward relative to the footwall block, it is called “normal” faulting; the opposite motion, with the hanging wall moving upward relative to the footwall, produces reverse or thrust faulting.

Types of faulting in tectonic earthquakesIn normal and reverse faulting, rock masses slip vertically past each other. In strike-slip faulting, the rocks slip past each other horizontally.

All known faults are assumed to have been the seat of one or more earthquakes in the past, though tectonic movements along faults are often slow, and most geologically ancient faults are now aseismic (that is, they no longer cause earthquakes). The actual faulting associated with an earthquake may be complex, and it is often not clear whether in a particular earthquake the total energy issues from a single fault plane.

Observed geologic faults sometimes show relative displacements on the order of hundreds of kilometres over geologic time, whereas the sudden slip offsets that produce seismic waves may range from only several centimetres to tens of metres. In the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, for example, a surface strike-slip of about one metre was observed along the causative fault east of Beijing, and in the 1999 Taiwan earthquake the Chelung-pu fault slipped up to eight metres vertically.