Implications of the Global Surface Fault Distribution and of Lithospheric Cooling

Kurzfassung

This contribution presents a model that links the observed distribution of surface faults to the spatial distribution of marsquakes. The annual seismic moment budget is computed based on the as-sumption that global cooling and subsequent shrink-ing of Mars is the main source of strain today [1]. A truncated Gutenberg-Richter distribution is used to re-late the seismic moment budget to marsquake frequen-cies. We have derived a theoretical relation for the limitation of quake size by the lengths of the individual faults. This relation is used for the simulation of epi-center catalogs that may serve as input data for the development of seismological experiments.