Computational earthquake dynamics is emerging as a key component in physics-based approaches to strong motion prediction for seismic hazard assessment and in physically constrained inversion approaches to earthquake source imaging from seismological and geodetic observations.

Typical applications in both areas require the ability to deal with rupture surfaces of complicated, realistic geometries with high computational efficiency.

In our implementation, triangular elements are used which allows for a better fit of the geometrical constraints of the problem, i.e., the fault shape, and for an easy control of the variation of element sizes using smooth refining and coarsening strategies.

To show the potential of unstructured triangular meshes to represent complex fault systems, we simulate an earthquake occurring on the fault system that ruptured during the 28 June 1992 Landers earthquake (Mw = 7.3).