Trace the subtle, approximately straight strike-slip fault that cuts across the dissected fan surfaces, descending to the right in the image. In normalized map coordinates measured from the upper left, a tracing corridor runs approximately from through , and toward . The broad central river interrupts the surface expression; extend the trace across that gap cautiously rather than following the river downstream.
The systematic jogs of small channels, particularly the conspicuous right-hand drainage, support right-lateral strike-slip faulting: draw arrows parallel to the trace, with the upper-side block toward the image right/down and the lower-side block toward the image left/up. Restore paired channel segments by reversing that sense and check that the fan rills align better. An isolated channel bend can have an erosional origin, so the consistent set of bends is stronger evidence than any one bend. No cardinal azimuth is asserted because Attachment B provides no north arrow.
Treat the two strands as newly formed conjugate faults obeying the same Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion, rather than merely inherited faults reactivated in a later stress field. A fault strike is an unoriented line, so is equivalent to . The acute angle between the fault strikes is therefore . The formal compressive acute bisector puts at azimuth and at . This orientation must also be checked against the mapped senses of strike-slip faulting, as discussed below.
Let be the angle between either fault plane and . Tangency of Mohr's circle to , where is effective stress normal to the plane and is cohesion, gives and . Thus
In the Mohr circle, the fault planes are apart around the circle, because a physical plane rotation is doubled. The figure uses to display both tangencies; a common nonzero cohesion changes the intercept, not the inferred friction angle. The inference of requires optimally oriented conjugate faults at formation: the two fault strikes alone cannot measure a friction coefficient for arbitrarily reactivated faults.
Consistency limitation: the mapped westward motion of the Anatolian block corresponds to left-lateral strike-slip faulting on the East Anatolian strand and right-lateral strike-slip faulting on the North Anatolian strand. East–west maximum compression for the acute-bisector construction instead predicts the opposite pair. The stress orientation compatible with the mapped senses lies near the north–south, obtuse bisector; the planes are then about from , which would give in the optimal-formation formula. A negative friction angle is inadmissible for ordinary frictional strength. Thus is the formal magnitude inferred from unoriented angles, while the full map does not support a self-consistent positive-friction, optimally formed conjugate pair. The common-stress assumption can still describe inherited or anisotropically controlled faults, but then their orientations no longer determine a unique coefficient.
Figure 1.
Conjugate-fault friction, reverse-fault stress directions, and shear versus tensile failure
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