4 Faults.docVIP

4 Faults A fault is a planar discontinuity between blocks of rock that have been displaced past one another, in a direction parallel to the discontinuity. A fault zone is a tabular region containing many parallel or anastomosing faults Fig. 7.9.b . A shear zone, in the sense preferred here, is a zone across which blocks of rock have been displaced in a faultlike manner, but without prominent development of visible faults. Shear zones are thus regions of localized ductile deformation, in contrast to fault zones that are regions of localized brittle deformation. Another distinction is the normal component of displacement, which is negligible for faults and fault zones, may be appreciable for shear zones. The displacement across a shear zone can be inclined at any angle, other than 90?, to the boundaries of the zone. In another common usage [Dennis 1967, p. 133 ] the term shear zone refers to a tabular region of pervasively faulted rock, that is, a fault zone containing a very large number of closely spaced and anastomosing fault surfaces. The rock immediately above and below any nonvertical fault is referred to, respectively, as the hanging wall and the footwall of the fault. The displacement vector connecting originally contiguous points in the hanging wall and footwall is called the net slip. The components of the net slip parallel to the strike and dip of the fault are the strike slip and the dip slip. The offset shown by a planar feature in a vertical cross section perpendicular to the fault is called the dip separation. The vertical and horizontal components of the dip separation are the throw and the heave. Notice, by comparing Figure 7.11 with Figure 7.10，that the dip separation is not equivalent to the dip slip, the former depending on the orientation of the offset surface as well as on the nature of the fault displacement. A fault with dominant strike slip displacement is called a strike slip fault. A fault with dominant dip slip displacement is a dip sl