WP8 Modelling of topographic signal: New software for the analysis of landscape response to faulting

Istituto Nazionele di Geofisica e Vulcanoilogia (Rome, Italy)
European Commission Research Directorates General Shared Cost

Slow active faults are inherently defined as faults that produce little displacement over geological time. This characteristic implies that the signature of such fault at the surface is very subtle and thus difficult to detect. One challenging strategy to tackle the problem of identifying elusive tectonic re-cords is the careful inspection of sensitive features in the landscape through quantificational methods. This approach assumes that even the faintest modification of the ground surface due to tectonics af-fects the development of recognizable landscape features. The ever increasing availability of comput-ing machines and detailed Digital Elevation Models (DEM) encourages the usage of dedicated soft-ware to speed up the geomorphic/tectonic analysis and mapping. The next sections will illustrate a suite of three original software tools dedicated at analysing the response of the landscape to the tec-tonic forcing caused by slip at depth on seismogenic faults. This process of analysis includes the fol-lowing main steps: (1) detection of sensitive landscape features; (2) parameterisation of seismogenic faults; and (3) modelling landscape evolution.

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