Alpine Fault Zone structure revealed by Distributed Acoustic Sensing

Asst. Prof. Voon Hui Lai

Asian School of the Environment, Nanyang Technological University

 2026.07.16（星期四）16:00，资源西楼2410

 摘要：

The Alpine Fault is a major plate-boundary structure accommodating significant relative motion between the Australian and Pacific plates in southern New Zealand and is expected to produce large earthquakes in coming decades. How fault slip evolves and what ground motions are produced when the fault next ruptures are expected on theoretical grounds to be strongly governed by the along-strike continuity of discrete principal slip zones and by the fault’s overall width. Despite extensive study, the along-strike structure of the fault at seismogenic depths and its continuity across segment boundaries remain poorly constrained. In this talk, we show how distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) can be used to record and model fault-zone guided waves (FZGW) from local earthquakes, resolving fault-zone structure at previously inaccessible length-scales. The DAS-enabled observations allow us to bridge geological and geophysical inferences, and provide new constraints on fault continuity, slip localisation, and the potential for multi-segment rupture in mature plate-boundary systems.

报告人简介：

Voon Hui Lai is an Assistant Professor at the Asian School of the Environment at Nanyang Technological University. As an observational seismologist, she combines dense seismic arrays with seismic waveform modelling to investigate earthquake ground motion, fault-zone structures, and volcanic hazards, as well as environmental processes such as coastal dynamics. She has extensive field experience deploying seismic and distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) arrays in cities and also remote areas in the South Island, New Zealand.

She received her B.A. in Geophysics from the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Geophysics from the California Institute of Technology. Prior to joining NTU, she was a Research Fellow at the Australian National University.