STUDY AREAS
Constraining the fault slip over various time windows ranging from 1 to 106 years and encompassing spatial scales from 1 to 105 meters has been rarely achieved. To fulfil this challenge we have chosen to work on normal faults in the Apennines range in Italy (mainly central and southern parts) because it provides one of the most context worldwide to study long-term morphological build-up from the addition of single earthquakes. The Apennines range is ~400 km long and ~100 km wide, and is undergoing NE-SW extension at a rate of 3-4 mm/yr since ~1 Ma. The extension is accommodated by 10-30-km long normal faults, arranged in several parallel segmented fault systems located along the ridge belt. The belt has been host to many destructive earthquakes over the last two millennia, with a space-time distribution showing a strong clustering. The most recent episode occurred in 2016, when 9 successive shocks (Mw 5 to 6.5) ruptured several patches of a ~60 km-long fault system over aperiod of 5 months. Moreover, Central Italy is one of the most instrumented regions in the world with one of the densest seismic and geodetic monitoring network in Europe. Most active faults are already well mapped with a large volume of published data concerning their Quaternary history.
