Irregular rupture propagation and geometric fault complexities during the 2010 Mw 7.2 El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake

The 2010 M(W) 7.2 El Mayor-Cucapah, Mexico, earthquake ruptured multiple faults with different faulting mechanisms. Resolving the earthquake rupture process and its relation to the geometric fault complexities is critical to our understanding of the earthquake source physics, but doing so by conventional finite-fault inversion is challenging because modelling errors due to inappropriate assumptions about the fault geometry distort the solution and make robust interpretation difficult. Here, using a potency density tensor approach to finite-fault inversion, we inverted the observed teleseismic P waveforms of the 2010 El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake to simultaneously estimate the rupture process and the fault geometry. We found that the earthquake consisted of an initial normal faulting rupture, which was followed by a strike-slip bilateral rupture towards the southeast and northwest that originated on the northwest side of the epicentre. The southeastern rupture propagated back through the initial rupture area, but with strike-slip faulting. Although the northwestern rupture propagated across the left step in the Puerta fault-accommodation zone, the rupture was temporarily stalled by the associated change of the fault geometry. These results highlight the irregular rupture process, which involved a back-propagating rupture and fluctuating rupture propagation controlled the complexity of the fault system.