Analysis of a model of elastic dislocations in geophysics

TL;DR

This paper investigates a mathematical model of elastic dislocations in geophysics, establishing well-posedness and uniqueness results for the inverse problem of identifying dislocation surfaces from surface displacement measurements.

Contribution

It provides the first rigorous analysis of the inverse problem for elastic dislocations in an inhomogeneous half-space with Lipschitz continuous parameters.

Findings

Proves well-posedness of the forward elastic dislocation problem.

Establishes uniqueness in the inverse problem under certain conditions.

Handles both tangential and normal displacement jumps.

Abstract

We analyze a mathematical model of elastic dislocations with applications to geophysics, where by an elastic dislocation we mean an open, oriented Lipschitz surface in the interior of an elastic solid, across which there is a discontinuity of the displacement. We model the Earth as an infinite, isotropic, inhomogeneous, elastic medium occupying a half space, and assume only Lipschitz continuity of the Lam\'e parameters. We study the well posedness of very weak solutions to the forward problem of determining the displacement by imposing traction-free boundary conditions at the surface, continuity of the traction and a given jump on the displacement across the fault. We employ suitable weighted Sobolev spaces for the analysis. We utilize the well posedness of the forward problem and unique-continuation arguments to establish uniqueness in the inverse problem of determining the dislocation surface and the displacement jump from measuring the displacement at the surface of the Earth. Uniqueness holds for tangential or normal jumps and under some geometric conditions on the surface.