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Imaging The Southern Trace Of The Black Hills Fault, Clark County, Nevada, Shelley A. Zaragoza

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Black Hills fault (BHF) is a SE-dipping normal fault forming the northwestern structural boundary of the Eldorado basin, ∼20 km southeast of Las Vegas, Nevada (Langenheim and Schmidt, 1996). The fault offsets Holocene strata and is thus considered to be active (Fossett, 2005). Therefore, the BHF poses a significant seismic hazard to the greater Las Vegas area.

Fossett (2005) estimated that the BHF is capable of producing a M _W 6.4 to 6.8 earthquake. However, this suggests a subsurface rupture length greater than the scarp length (Fossett, 2005). To test this hypothesis, remote sensing, geologic mapping, and high-resolution seismic …