Faults and Earthquakes - Earthquake Engineering for Structural Design - page 187

6.2.3 Crustal Strike-slip Earthquakes
Figure 6.7 presents the world's zones where crust strike -slip earthquakes occur.
One can see that, in comparison with subduction earthquakes, the areas are
reduced.
This earthquake type occurs when the two tectonic plates slide and grind against
each other along a transform fault. Despite the fact that few lateral movements
occur on land, they have produced the largest damaging earthquakes (see San
Francisco, Loma Prieta, Kobe and Kocaeli earthquakes).
The most famous earthquakes occurred along the Californian San Andreas Fault
(see also Figure 5.10), the main of which are shown in Figure 6.8a, with two main
areas, San Francisco and Los Angeles zones. In some case, the strike-slips
produced slipping at the surface of some meters, in many cases, the strike-slips
remain blind (Fig. 6. 8b).
Another important strike-slip earthquake occurred in Turkey's North Anatolian
Fault (Fig. 6.9).It is very significant to understand how the earthquakes occur in
these fault systems, being supervised by GPS. Geodetic analysis shows a relative
motion of Anatolia to Europe. While Europe relatively moves from left to right,
Anatolia relatively moves in contrary direction (Doglioni et al, 2002).
Figure 6.7 Crustal strike-slip earthquakes (modified after USGS, nd)