Tectonic Inheritance With Dipping Faults and Deformation Fabric in the Brittle and Ductile Southern California Crust Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth

Plate motions in Southern California have undergone a transition from compressional and extensional regimes to a dominantly strike ‐slip regime in the Miocene. Strike ‐slip motion is most easily accommodated on vertical faults, and major transform fault strands in the region are typically mapped as near vertical on the surface. However, some previous work suggests that these faults have a dipping geometry at depth. We analyze receiver function arrivals that vary harmonically with back azimuth at allavailable broadband stations in the region. The results show a dominant signal from contrasts in dipping foliation as well as dipping isotropic velocity contrasts from all crustal depths, including from the ductile middle to lower crust. We interpret these receiver function observations as a dipping fault ‐parallel structural