Refining the location of the coastal Newport-Inglewood fault with Structure from Motion photogrammetric models and shallow marine seismic profiling

Amber Tucker, Jayne M. Bormann, & Neal W. Driscoll

Published August 15, 2019, SCEC Contribution #9805, 2019 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #115

The Newport-Inglewood fault (NIF) is an active fault with a history of damaging earthquakes that cuts coastal communities in Southern California. Onshore, the fault extends from Beverly Hills to Newport Beach, where it continues offshore to connect with the Rose Canyon fault and parallels the coastline south towards San Diego and Baja California. An end-to-end rupture of the 225-km-long fault system has the potential to produce a M 7.5 earthquake (Sahakian et al., 2017), making the Newport-Inglewood Rose Canyon (NIRC) fault system a significant hazard to densely populated coastal communities in Southern California. Extensive urban development in the early 1900s obscured the geomorphic expression of the fault before the potential hazard was recognized, limiting the ability to map the fault trace and conduct traditional paleoseismic fault studies that require undisturbed landforms and shallow deposits to characterize the seismic potential of the NIF system. Here, we present high-resolution marine sub-bottom CHIRP profiles from coastal waterways that cross the coastal NIF and Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetric models created using historical aerial photographs from the 1920s to refine the location of fault segments along the California coast between Newport Beach and Long Beach. Utilizing these techniques contributes additional information that complements the results of traditional terrestrial paleoseismic studies. Evaluating marine seismic profiles from coastal waterways in conjunction with a pre-development digital terrestrial surface model will provide geographic continuity to previously disparate observations of faulting.

Citation
Tucker, A., Bormann, J. M., & Driscoll, N. W. (2019, 08). Refining the location of the coastal Newport-Inglewood fault with Structure from Motion photogrammetric models and shallow marine seismic profiling. Poster Presentation at 2019 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Earthquake Geology