Quasi-static deformation of a viscoelastic half-space by a displacement dislocation

Abstract

The correspondence principle is used to get the Laplace transformed solution of the problem of the quasi-static deformation of a viscoelastic half-space by a shear displacement dislocation from the corresponding static elastic results. The transformed solution is inverted for the Voigt and the Maxwell viscoelastic models. It is shown that, for a vertical dip-slip fault, the surface displacements for the viscoelastic case are identical with the elastic displacements. In the case of a vertical strike-slip fault, detailed numerical results are obtained for both a point source and a finite rectangular source. It is found that the results for the viscoelastic models differ significantly from the corresponding elastic results.