Chris Castillo

Stanford University | SU · Department of Geophysics

Transform faults have anomalously low rates of seismicity, but it’s not clear whether this reflects persistent earthquake-generating fault patches surrounded by creep, or the presence of creep and earthquakes at different times along the same patch. We use new, autonomous underwater vehicle high-resolution seafloor mapping to image the morphology o...

Much about the offshore California Continental Borderland remains unknown, despite its location off the most populated area of the west coast of North America, vital importance to US interests, and potential for seismic and tsunamigenic hazards. In 2015 and 2016, Exploration Vessel (E/ V) Nautilus of the Ocean Exploration Trust undertook a series o...

Study of shear zones and associated basins within an oblique rift can shed light on the development of a young transform continental margin. San Pedro Basin lies within the Inner Borderland Rift offshore southern California, where it is bisected by the San Pedro Basin Fault (SPBF). Based on seismic reflection and multibeam bathymetry data, we show...

Submerged paleoshorelines and terraces surrounding Santa Catalina Island and the Pilgrim/Kidney Banks in the California Continental Borderland demonstrate late Quaternary tectonic subsidence, in contrast to the other islands of the California Continental Borderland that are experiencing tectonic uplift. We used high-resolution seismicreflection pro...

At the boundary between the Western Transverse Ranges province and Inner Continental Borderland of Southern California, strain is partitioned across the sinistral-oblique Anacapa-Dume Fault system. Sycamore Knoll, a pop-up structure 20 km west of Point Dume in the hanging wall of the north-dipping Anacapa-Dume Fault, stands out as an anomalous bath...

We analyze active and passive seismic data recorded by the Stanford distributed acoustic sensing array (SDASA) located in conduits under the Stanford University campus. For the active data we used low-energy sources (betsy gun and sledge hammer) and recorded data using both the DAS array and 98 three-component nodes deployed along a 2D line. The jo...

E/V Nautilus cruise NA075 returned to the Southern California Continental Borderland, an area that remains largely unexplored. Part of the broader North America- Pacific plate boundary, this region extends ~300 km west of the San Andreas Fault and displays an unusually rugged phys- iography. During the cruise, the multibeam sonar mapped ~5,200 km2...