Interactive editing of digital fault models

We describe an application to interactively create and manipulate digital fault maps, either by tracing existing (paper) fault maps created from geological surveys, or by directly observing fault expressions and earthquake hypocenters in remote sensing data such as high‐resolution (⩾100k × 100k elevation postings) digital elevation models with draped color imagery. Such fault maps serve as input data to finite‐element‐method simulations of fault interactions, and are crucial to understand regional tectonic processes causing earthquakes, and have tentatively been used to forecast future seismic events or to predict the shaking from likely future earthquakes. This fault editor is designed for immersive virtual reality environments such as CAVEs, and presents users with visualizations of scanned 2D fault maps and textured 3D terrain models, and a set of 3D editing tools to create or manipulate faults. We close with a case study performed by one of our geologist co‐authors (Yikilmaz), which evaluates the use of our fault editor in creating a detailed digital fault model of the North Anatolian Fault in Turkey, one of the largest, seismically active strike‐slip faults in the world. Yikilmaz, who was directly involved in program development, used our fault editor both in a CAVE and on a desktop computer, and compares it to the industry‐standard software package ArcGIS. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.