How To Identify Hanging Wall And Footwall

The hanging wall slides down relative to the footwall.

How to identify hanging wall and footwall.

When working a tabular ore body the miner stood with the footwall under his feet and with the hanging wall above him. The line it makes on the earth s surface is the fault trace. We distinguish between dip slip and strike slip hanging wall movements. Then you determine the relative motion between the hanging wall and footwall.

The hanging wall occurs above the fault plane and the footwall occurs below it. The fault plane is where the action is. Other articles where normal fault is discussed. Dip slip movement occurs when the hanging wall moved predominantly up or down relative to the footwall.

Other articles where hanging wall is discussed. This terminology comes from mining. Hanging wall movement determines the geometric classification of faulting. In a fault plane that dips 45 degrees the overlying rock unit is the hanging wall and the underlying rock unit is the footwall.

In a strike slip fault they slide past each other the foot wall and hanging wall are not there because it has. Every fault tilted from the vertical has a hanging wall and footwall. To correctly identify a fault you must first figure out which block is the footwall and which is the hanging wall. An arcuate cliff called the headwall.

To determine which is which visualize yourself creating a mine in along the fault. In an ideal cirque the headwall is semicircular in plan view. They bound many of the mountain ranges of the world and many of the rift valleys found along spreading margins. Hanging wall and footwall.

More common are headwalls angular in map view due to irregularities in height along. The main components of a fault are 1 the fault plane 2 the fault trace 3 the hanging wall and 4 the footwall. Cirques tarns u shaped valleys arêtes and horns. If the motion was down the fault is called a normal fault if the movement was up the.

Draw a normal and reverse fault label the hanging wall and footwall for each also show how they move for each fault. This situation however is generally found only in cirques cut into flat plateaus. But that is when the foot wall moves down the hanging wall moves up. In normal faulting the hanging wall moves downwards in relation to the footwall.

It is a flat surface that may be vertical or sloping. Normal dip slip faults are produced by vertical compression as earth s crust lengthens.