Sparta fault

The Sparta Fault is the western border of the Eurotas rift valley. That valley is a graben. To the west of this graben is the horst of the Taygetos Mountains. You can see here textbook examples of scarps. Scarps are visible on the eastern side of Taygetus at the base of its spurs. They result from sudden slippages of the hanging wall in the direction of the dip, causing earthquakes. Single earthquakes result in 1–12 m of scarp. The Sparta fault is zig-zag in strike, varying between N 170° E and N 140° E. The maximum slippage has been 10–12 m in three increments. The earthquake of 464 BC, which levelled Sparta, resulted from a slippage of 3–4 m over a length of 20 km of the fault. The slip rate has been about 1 mm per year suggesting an average interval between earthquakes of 3000 years. If you get this kind of uplifts and scarps as a result, the fault scarp is very prone to erosion. Weathering, mass wasting, and water runoff can soon wear down these bluffs, sometimes resulting in V-shaped valleys along runoff channels. Adjacent V-shaped valley formations give the remaining fault spurs a very triangular shape. This formation is known as a triangular facet.