Satellite image of a part of the Piqiang Fault (China), a northwest trending strike-slip fault that runs roughly perpendicular to the thrust faults for more than 70 kilometers. The reddish, greenish and brownish bands are continental Devonian sandstones, Silurian deeper marine sediments and Cambro-Ordovician limestones, respectively. They form one of several parallel ridges (up to 1200 m high) which all are composed of the same stack of rocks and belong to the Keping Shan thrust belt immediately south of the Southern Tien Shan Mountains.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Robert Simmon and Jesse Allen, using Landsat data from the USGS Earth Explorer. Caption by Adam Voiland.
2013-07-30
<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=82853&amp;src=fb">Faults in Xinjiang</a> (Nasa Earth Observatory)