EPS Ground Rupture — interactive companion¶
This site is a companion to a 2025 Earthquake Spectra paper on thrust and reverse-fault surface rupture. The paper's figures are static; the same underlying data is republished here as live dashboards you can filter and interrogate. It is built and maintained by the same research group.
The study pairs two kinds of evidence. On one side are two-dimensional distinct element method (DEM) simulations — numerical experiments in which a modelled fault slips through a sediment layer and the resulting surface deformation is measured automatically. The paper reports 3,434 such experiments, sampled at 346,834 model stages taken every 0.05 m of slip.1 On the other side are field observations of real earthquakes, drawn from published compilations of surface-rupture measurements. Setting the two side by side is what the paper is for: it finds that the simulations "comprehensively describe the range of historic surface rupture observations" in the field compilation.1
Each dashboard answers a different form of that comparison. Model vs reality overlays field measurements on the simulated cloud. Response curves stay inside the model, showing how each measured output changes as slip accumulates under different conditions. Per-event boxplots invert the first view — summarising the spread of real measurements within each earthquake, with the model's own distribution alongside. Slip regression does arithmetic on the model — a fitted slip-to-uplift law per fault dip, run backwards to infer the slip behind Kern County's 1952 field measurements. And Distributions looks at the shape of the model's results as a whole — the spread of each output, split by any input, with the field's measurements standing in the histograms as reference lines. The figure → dashboard crosswalk maps each one back to the figure it derives from.
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Every simulated point and every field point on one canvas.
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How each measured output grows as slip accumulates, condition by condition.
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The field data's own spread, event by event, with the model alongside.
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A slip-to-uplift law fitted per fault dip — run backwards on Kern County 1952.
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The spread of each output across all simulations, and which input shifts it.
New to this? Start with the glossary
Faults, scarps, DZW, FDHI, SURE — the field has a lot of vocabulary, and the paper assumes you already have it. The glossary assumes you have none of it: it defines every term and abbreviation used here in plain language, and explains how the measured quantities relate to each other. Nothing else on the site depends on reading it first.
Reading this without the paper
The pages assume no prior reading. Every claim about the science is sourced to the paper; claims about how the data was prepared are sourced to the project's own build notes. The datasets are described on the Data page.
The paper¶
Everything on this site comes from one study. Please cite as:
Chiama, K., Bednarz, W., Moss, R., Plesch, A., and Shaw, J. H. (2025). "Quantifying relationships between fault parameters and rupture characteristics associated with thrust and reverse fault earthquakes." Earthquake Spectra, 41(5), 3977–4014. DOI: 10.1177/87552930251346434
Cite the papers and the archives — not this site
These dashboards add no new results. They are a convenience layer that makes already-published data easier to reach, so if you use anything you found here — a value read off a chart, an exported view, a figure — cite the paper above, and cite the data archives as well where you used the data itself. The DEM experiments are deposited open-access on DesignSafe-CI and the field compilations carry their own citations; the full list, with DOIs, is under How to cite this data.
Any DOI issued for this site or its source code identifies the software — a pointer to the code that built these views, not a substitute for the citations above.
The article itself is not open access
Earthquake Spectra published the article under a "© The Author(s) 2025" line with no Creative Commons licence, so nothing is reproduced here from the typeset version and the paper's own wording is quoted only sparingly. The figures on this site are the authors' pre-typeset originals, which carry their own reuse terms — see The paper.
Site authors¶
Kristen Chiama, Andreas Plesch, John H. Shaw are the primary contributors to the data, resources and figures behind this site.
Source code¶
The pipeline that produces the data behind every dashboard — and this site itself — lives in HarvardRC/eps-ground-rupture under the Apache-2.0 licence.
Please cite as:
Chiama, K., Bednarz, W., Moss, R., Plesch, A., and Shaw, J. H. (2025). "Quantifying relationships between fault parameters and rupture characteristics associated with thrust and reverse fault earthquakes." Earthquake Spectra, 41(5), 3977–4014. DOI: 10.1177/87552930251346434
If you use the underlying data itself, cite the archives it comes from as well — the DEM experiments are deposited open-access on DesignSafe-CI, and the field compilations carry their own citations. The full list, with DOIs, is under How to cite this data.
Any DOI issued for this site or its source code identifies the software and the website, and does not replace the citations above.
Related work, for the wider project's 3D models — not a source for anything shown here:
Chiama, K., Plesch, A., and Shaw, J. H. (2025). "Along-Strike Variability of Surface Deformation on Thrust and Reverse Fault Ruptures: Insights from 3D Distinct Element Method Models." Seismological Research Letters 96(6), 3473–3489. DOI: 10.1785/0220250173