Major earthquakes occur regularly on an isolated plate boundary fault |
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Authors: | Berryman Kelvin R Cochran Ursula A Clark Kate J Biasi Glenn P Langridge Robert M Villamor Pilar |
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Affiliation: | GNS Science, Post Office Box 30-368, Lower Hutt 5040, New Zealand. k.berryman@gns.cri.nz |
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Abstract: | The scarcity of long geological records of major earthquakes, on different types of faults, makes testing hypotheses of regular versus random or clustered earthquake recurrence behavior difficult. We provide a fault-proximal major earthquake record spanning 8000 years on the strike-slip Alpine Fault in New Zealand. Cyclic stratigraphy at Hokuri Creek suggests that the fault ruptured to the surface 24 times, and event ages yield a 0.33 coefficient of variation in recurrence interval. We associate this near-regular earthquake recurrence with a geometrically simple strike-slip fault, with high slip rate, accommodating a high proportion of plate boundary motion that works in isolation from other faults. We propose that it is valid to apply time-dependent earthquake recurrence models for seismic hazard estimation to similar faults worldwide. |
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