How To Distinguish Between Hanging Wall And Footwall

A type of fault in which the hanging wall moves down relative to the footwall and the fault surface dips steeply commonly from 50 o to 90 o groups of normal faults can produce horst and graben topography or a series of relatively high and low standing fault blocks as seen in areas where the crust is rifting or being pulled apart by plate tectonic activity.

How to distinguish between hanging wall and footwall.

In normal faulting the hanging wall moves. As nouns the difference between hangingwall and footwall is that hangingwall is while footwall is geology the section of rock that extends below a diagonal fault line the corresponding upper section being the hanging wall. In a non vertical fault where the fault plane dips the footwall is the section of the fault that lies under the fault while the hanging wall lies over the fault. Its strike and its dip.

In a fault plane that dips 45 degrees the overlying rock unit is the hanging wall and the underlying rock unit is the footwall. The names come about from the. Groups of normal faults can. The footwall cataclasite exhibits higher averages of neutron porosity 7 6 and lower values of electric resistivity 232 ωm compared to the hanging wall phyllite 4 8 453 ωm.

Any fault plane can be completely described with two measurements. Where the fault plane is sloping as with normal and reverse faults the upper side is the hanging wall and the lower side is the footwall. This clear contrast between the hanging wall and footwall may account for the difference in maximum burial and structural variation.