f Location of subseismic faults clues from the topography of scaled experiments

How to constrain the location of subseismic faults using the geometry of fault networks detected by seismic data is a long standing question for people involved in reservoir management. The development of 3-D seismic, though it has improve the detection of small faults has not answer this question. We used scaled models to adress this problem because they are reproductible and can be used to model structures described by 3-D seismic (Colletta et al., 1991). This allows to define geometrical rules with statistical significance. In addition they can be used to gain some informations about fault growth and chronology because experimental fault networks are created on a human time scale.