Editorial: Unveiling Active Faults: Multiscale Perspectives and Alternative Approaches Addressing the Seismic Hazard Challenge

Abstract

Investigations of seismic hazard across the range of tectonic environments on Earth are challenging because they require high quality data from multiple disciplines (e.g., seismology, structural geology, geomorphology, geochronology, archaeology, and geodesy) covering a wide range of temporal (days to millennial) and spatial (e.g., microns to hundreds of kilometers) scales and because seismogenic conditions and drivers are variable and fluctuating. The international earthquake science community has become more inter-disciplinary over the past several decades with the establishment of collaborative geological and geophysical centers such as (but not limited to) the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC, https://www.scec.org/), United States Geological Survey (USGS, https://earthquake.usgs.gov/), the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV, https://www.ingv.it/), the Interuniversity Center for 3D Seismotectonics with territorial applications (CRUST, https://www.crust.unich.it/).

Collaborations along with improvements in data sources such as the implementation of denser seismic and geodetic arrays, high resolution (meter-scale and better) topographic data, improvements in geochronology, and the widespread availability of catalogued geophysical data, all present opportunities to unveil new details about active faulting. With that in mind, we proposed this Frontiers in Earth Science Research Topic as a venue for publishing disparate approaches for addressing seismic hazard.

This Research Topic includes sixteen published articles investigating diverse tectonic regions of the Earth, at different time- and resolution scales, spanning from low-to-fast deformation rates contexts, using complementary data approaches spanning from earthquake geology to seismology, seismotectonics, and geomechanics (Figure 1). Here we provide a short review of the contributions organized by the investigation’s primary methodology.