Direct Inversion Method of Fault Slip Analysis to Determine the Orientation of Principal Stresses and Relative Chronology for Tectonic Events in Southwestern White Mountain Region of New Hampshire, USA

Abstract

The orientation and relative magnitudes of paleo tectonic stresses in the western central region of the White Mountains of New Hampshire is reconstructed using the direct inversion method of fault slip analysis on 1–10-m long fractures exposed on a series of road cuts along Interstate 93, just east of the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in North Woodstock, NH, USA. The inversion yields nine stress regimes which identify five tectonic events that impacted the White Mountain region over the last 410 Ma. The inversion method has potential application in basin analysis.

A Summary of “Future Advances in Basin Modeling: Suggestions from Current Observations, Analyses and Simulations”

“…Who could guess that two weeks of outcrop mapping could reveal all the tectonic events that impacted the White Mountains over the last 410 Ma? Barton and Angelier [2] show how slip indicators on oriented outcrop faults can be inverted to identify the changes in the stress tensor that mark these events. The fresh, glacially exhumed New Hampshire outcrops are ideal for this purpose, but the dramatic success of the inversion suggests efforts to collect similar data (from drill holes, seismics, etc.)…”

Investigating Surface Fractures and Materials Behavior of Cultural Heritage Buildings Based on the Attribute Information of Point Clouds Stored in the TLS Dataset

“…In order to determine the fracture distribution, the spatial geometries of the plane, such as dip angle and dip direction, needs to be defined first. In this regard, dip angle is defined between the horizontal plane and the discontinuity plane, while the dip direction refers to the bearing angle (a clockwise direction with respect to north of the projection of the discontinuity plane in the horizontal plane angle of planar features) [59][60][61]. These criteria are used to characterize the distinctive features of the plane, whether it is a fracture zone or not.…”

“…It refers to the magnitude of the angular direction to the normal vector. In standard practice, the azimuth is measured from true north; nevertheless, this study uses this term for the calculation of dip angle and dip direction, as also mentioned in several references [59][60][61]. Furthermore, two crucial components obtained from normal vectors are the magnitude of dip angle and the dip direction.…”