SCEC Award Number 17206 View PDF
Proposal Category Workshop Proposal
Proposal Title Toward a SCEC Community Rheology Model: TAG Kickoff and Workshop
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Elizabeth Hearn Independent Contractor Michael Oskin University of California, Davis Greg Hirth Brown University Whitney Behr University of Texas at Austin Wayne Thatcher United States Geological Survey
Other Participants
SCEC Priorities 1c, 3a, 3b SCEC Groups Geodesy, SDOT, CXM
Report Due Date 10/09/2017 Date Report Submitted 10/25/2017
Project Abstract
 A one-day Community Rheology Model workshop was held at the Palm Springs Hilton on the Saturday before the 2017 SCEC annual meeting (September 9, 2017). The purposes of this workshop were to provide a forum for presenting a preliminary Geological Framework (GF) and a preliminary Community Thermal Model (CTM), and to present (and discuss) a draft “straw man” CRM for the Mojave GF lithotectonic province, based on the CTM, the GF and community input on flow laws suitable for Mojave lithosphere rock types and conditions, and to discuss next steps for the CRM effort. The meeting ended with plenary discussions and breakout sessions, which resulted in a prioritized list of research tasks to move the CRM toward a draft product by 2019.
Intellectual Merit A Community Rheology Model (CRM) is central to the science goals of SCEC5. The CRM will provide a consensus description of constitutive properties at the lithospheric scale, which is essential for investigating time-varying tectonic stress accumulation and earthquake stress release in southern California.
Broader Impacts As a complete set, the SCEC community models will provide a vetted and physically consistent resource that researchers can draw on to generate reproducible physical simulation results while moving beyond simplistic assumptions about rheology. Such simulations (alone or in concert with efforts such as UCERF3) provide insight on time-dependent probabilities and maximum sizes of earthquakes on major faults, as well as expected shaking intensities and other parameters critical to designing seismically-safe infrastructure.
Exemplary Figure Figure 1. Summary slide from the 2017 CRM workshop. Preliminary geologic framework is on the left, and posited strength profiles (based on assumed geotherms) for the Mojave lithotectonic block are on the right. Strength profiles generated using the preliminary Mojave CTM indicate much higher differential stresses. Modified from figures by Michael Oskin and Whitney Behr.
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