Distributed and localized faulting in extensional settings: Insight from the North Ethiopian Rift–Afar transition area

Extensional fault systems in the Earth's crust can exhibit two end‐member geometries that we identify as distributed and localized faulting regimes. A satellite image analysis of fault populations from the Main Ethiopian Rift‐Afar area reveals that the rift architecture contains these two faulting regimes. The occurrence of these regimes reveals a jump in the scale of fault segmentation and linkage. Strain localization at rift border zones exhibits particularly large‐scale fault linkage and a power law size distribution. This regime replaces prior distributed fault systems, showing small‐scale fault linkage and an exponential size distribution. The distributed faulting is interpreted as confined to the thick trap basalt carapace. We show that continental fault systems can develop by a combination of these two geometries, and we demonstrate how to quantitatively decipher the jump between them.