The block of rock that lies above an inclined fault or an ore body.
Compare with footwall
Example sentencesExamples
Although normal faulting is the dominant deformation style within the study area, folding of pre-rift and syn-rift strata in the footwall and hanging wall of the fault zone is common.
In the Alpine foothills of Provence, Cretaceous syn-rift rocks deposited in the hanging walls of normal growth faults are typically ten times thicker than the equivalent footwall successions.
These throw gradients require footwall / hanging wall stratigraphic thickness ratios of up to c.3.3 within mudstones immediately above the Cadna-owie horizon, the origins of which are considered in a later section.
The faults have a systematic geometric relationship with folds, with anticlines in the mutual hanging walls of fault pairs and broader footwall synclines that define the shallow dish forms of the polygons.
As for the mesoscale normal faults inside the ICruibeke Fault Zone, they cannot be considered as classical brittle planar normal fault planes downwarping a hanging wall relative to a footwall along a single discrete plane.
Definition of hanging wall in US English:
hanging wall
noun
Geology
The block of rock that lies above an inclined fault or an ore body.
Compare with footwall
Example sentencesExamples
As for the mesoscale normal faults inside the ICruibeke Fault Zone, they cannot be considered as classical brittle planar normal fault planes downwarping a hanging wall relative to a footwall along a single discrete plane.
In the Alpine foothills of Provence, Cretaceous syn-rift rocks deposited in the hanging walls of normal growth faults are typically ten times thicker than the equivalent footwall successions.
The faults have a systematic geometric relationship with folds, with anticlines in the mutual hanging walls of fault pairs and broader footwall synclines that define the shallow dish forms of the polygons.
Although normal faulting is the dominant deformation style within the study area, folding of pre-rift and syn-rift strata in the footwall and hanging wall of the fault zone is common.
These throw gradients require footwall / hanging wall stratigraphic thickness ratios of up to c.3.3 within mudstones immediately above the Cadna-owie horizon, the origins of which are considered in a later section.