Category Archives for Earthquakes
NZ’s next large Alpine Fault quake is likely coming sooner than we thought, study shows
NASA/JPL/NGA, CC BY-ND
Jamie Howarth, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington and Rupert Sutherland, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
Author provided
The chances of New Zealand’s Alpine Fault rupturing in a damaging earthquake in the next 50 years are much higher than previously thought, according to our research, published today.
The 850km Alpine Fault runs along the mountainous spine of the South Island, marking the boundary where the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates meet and grind against each other, forcing up the Southern Alps. Over the past 4,000 years, it has ruptured more than 20 times, on average around every 250 years.
The last major earthquake on the Alpine Fault was in 1717. It shunted land horizontally by eight metres and uplifted the mountains a couple of metres. Large earthquakes on the fault tend to propagate uninhibited for hundreds of kilometres.
Until now, scientists thought the risk of a major earthquake in the next 50 years was about 30%. But our analysis of data from 20 previous earthquakes along 350 kilometres of the fault shows the probability of that earthquake occurring before 2068 is about 75%. We also calculated an 82% chance the earthquake will be of magnitude 8 or higher.
Alpine Fault earthquakes in space and time
From space, the fault appears like a straight line on the western side of the Southern Alps. But there are variations in the fault’s geometry (its orientation and the angle it dips into Earth’s crust) and the rate at which the two plates slip past each other.
These differences separate the fault into different segments. We thought the boundaries between these segments might be important for stopping earthquake ruptures, but we didn’t appreciate how important until now.
Author provided
We examined evidence from 20 previous Alpine Fault ruptures recorded in sediments in four lakes and two swamps on the west coast of the South Island over the past 4,000 years. From this evidence, we built one of the most complete earthquake records of its kind.
Once we analysed and dated the sediments from lakes near the Alpine Fault, we were able to see new patterns in the distribution of earthquakes along the fault. One of our findings is a curious “earthquake gate” at the boundary between the fault’s south western and central segments. It appears to determine how large an Alpine Fault earthquake gets.
Some ruptures stop at the gate and produce major earthquakes in the magnitude 7 range. Ruptures that pass through the gate grow into great earthquakes of magnitude 8 or more. This pattern of stopping or letting ruptures pass through tends to occur in sequences, producing phases of major or great earthquakes through time.
Read more:
New Zealand’s Alpine Fault reveals extreme underground heat and fluid pressure
Forecasting the next Alpine Fault earthquake
From the record of past earthquakes it is possible to forecast the likelihood of a future earthquake (i.e. a 75% chance the fault will rupture in the next 50 years). But from these data alone it is not possible to estimate the magnitude of the next event.
For this we used a physics-based model of how earthquakes behave and applied it to the Alpine Fault, testing it against data from earlier earthquake sequences. This is the first time we have been able to use past earthquake data that span multiple large earthquakes and are of sufficient quality to allow us to evaluate how such models could be used in forecasting.
The physics-based model simulated Alpine Fault earthquake behaviour when we included the variations in fault geometry that define the different fault segments. When the simulation is combined with our record of past behaviour it is possible to estimate the magnitude of the next earthquake.
Read more:
Rocky icebergs and deep anchors – new research on how planetary forces shape the Earth’s surface
The Alpine Fault earthquake record shows the past three earthquakes ruptured through the earthquake gate and produced great (magnitude 8 or higher) earthquakes. Our simulations show that if three earthquakes passed through the gate, the next one is also likely to go through.
This means we’d expect the next earthquake to be similar to the last one in 1717, which ruptured along about 380km of the fault and had an estimated magnitude 8.1.
Our findings do not change the fact the Alpine Fault has always been and will continue to be hazardous. But now we can say the next earthquake will likely happen in the next 50 years.
We need to move beyond planning the immediate response to the next event, which has been done well through the Alpine Fault Magnitude 8 (AF8) programme, to thinking about how we make decisions about future investment to improve infrastructure and community preparedness.
Jamie Howarth, Senior lecturer, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington and Rupert Sutherland, Professor of tectonics and geophysics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Istanbul Earthquake Risk & early Warning
The Great Wall of Japan
Melting ocean mud helps prevent major earthquakes — and may show where quake risk is highest
Shutterstock
Kate Selway, Macquarie University
The largest and most destructive earthquakes on the planet happen in places where two tectonic plates collide. In our new research, published today in Nature Communications, we have produced new models of where and how rocks melt in these collision zones in the deep Earth.
This improved knowledge about the distribution of melted rock will help us to understand where to expect destructive earthquakes to occur.
What causes earthquakes?
Giant earthquakes, such as the magnitude-9.0 quake in 2011 that caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster, or the magnitude-9.1 event in 2004 that caused the Boxing Day tsunami, occur at the collision zones between two tectonic plates. In these so-called subduction zones, one plate slides beneath the other.
Read more:
The Fukushima quake may be an echo of the 2011 disaster — and a warning for the future
The sinking plate acts as an enormous conveyor belt, carrying material from the surface down into the deep Earth. Earthquakes occur where the sinking plate gets stuck; strain builds up until it eventually quickly releases. Fluids and molten rocks in the system lubricate the plates, helping them slide past each other and stopping big earthquakes from happening.
When happens when ocean mud ends up inside Earth?
My colleague Michael Förster and I were interested in what happens to sediments when they are carried down into the deep Earth at a subduction zone. These sediments start out as thick layers of mud on the ocean floor but get carried down into the deep Earth as part of the sinking plate.
Michael took a sample of mud collected from the ocean floor and heated it up to the high temperatures and pressures it would experience in a subduction zone. He found the sediments melt and then react with the surrounding rocks, forming the mineral phlogopite and also saline fluids.
A puzzle solved
Geophysical models of subduction zones allow us to map out exactly where the molten rocks and fluids are. These measurements are like x-rays of Earth’s interior, helping us peer into places we cannot otherwise see.
We were particularly interested in models of the electrical conductivity of subduction zones. This is because the fluids and molten rock we were looking at are more electrically conductive than the surrounding rock. Models of subduction zones have long been enigmatic, because they show Earth is very conductive in regions where people did not expect to see a lot of fluids and molten rock.
Selway & Forster, Author provided
I calculated the electrical conductivity of the phlogopite, molten sediments and fluids that were produced in the experiments and found they matched extremely well with the geophysical models. This provides good evidence that what we see in the experiments is happening in the real Earth, and allows us to calculate where the molten rock and fluids are in subduction zones around the world.
Understanding where big earthquakes are likely to occur
Giant earthquakes are not likely to occur in the parts of the subduction zone where the sediments melt. All of the products of the melting — the molten rock itself, the saline fluids, and even the mineral phlogopite — help the two plates slide past each other easily without causing large earthquakes.
We compared our models with locations of earthquakes in subduction zones along the west coast of the United States. We found there were no large earthquakes where sediments were melting, but the movement of fluids from the melted sediments could explain some small, non-destructive earthquakes and very faint signals of tremor where the two plates easily slide past each other.
Read more:
Breaking new ground – the rise of plate tectonics
Earthquakes are a tangible reminder that we live on an active planet and that, deep beneath our feet, huge forces are making rocks flow and melt and collide. Accurately predicting earthquakes will be an ongoing goal of geoscientists for decades to come.
It requires intricate detective work to weave together all the tiny threads of information we have about processes that occur so deep in the Earth that we will never be able to see or sample them. Our results are one new thread in this puzzle. We hope it will contribute to one day being able to keep people safe from the risk of earthquakes.
Read more:
Underground sounds: why we should listen to earthquakes
Kate Selway, , Macquarie University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
How we discovered the conditions behind ‘slow earthquakes’ that happen over weeks or even months – new research
Naeblys/Shutterstock
Åke Fagereng, Cardiff University
You’re probably familiar with earthquakes as relatively short, sharp shocks that can shake the ground, topple buildings and tear rips in the Earth. These earthquakes, and their aftershocks, happen because although tectonic plates move at centimetres per year, this motion is seldom steady. Earthquakes result from a “stick-slip” motion, where rocks “stick” along fault planes while stress accumulates until a “slip” occurs – a bit like pulling on a stuck door until it suddenly opens. This slip also releases energy as the seismic waves that, in large magnitude earthquakes, create substantial damage.
In the last two decades another class of stick-slip motion has been discovered worldwide. These “slow slip events” last for weeks to months, compared to seconds to minutes for earthquakes. Slow slip events occur faster than average plate motion, but too slow to generate measurable seismic waves. This means they need to be studied by GPS networks rather then seismometers.
Although their motion is slow, the amount of movement that occurs in a slow slip event is substantial. Earthquake magnitude depends on the distance that rocks move and the area this movement occurs over. Using the same definition, many slow slip events would have had magnitudes above 7.0 if they slipped at earthquake speeds.
Slow slip events repeat at intervals of a year to a few years. Compared to major earthquakes, which have repeat times of hundreds of years (or more), slow slip events are actually very frequent. Even in the short time of a couple of decades that we’ve observed these types of slip, many cycles have occurred in several places – notably around the Pacific Rim.
Slow slip events generally happen next to areas where faults are locked and expected to rupture in major earthquakes. It’s therefore possible that these slow slip events can trigger earthquakes on neighbouring locked faults. It has, for example, been suggested that slow slip events preceded the 2011 magnitude 9.1 Tohoku earthquake in Japan and the 2014 magnitude 8.1 Iquique earthquake in Chile. That said, numerous slow slip events have also been observed without any immediate, subsequent major earthquakes on neighbouring faults.
Earthquakes may also trigger slow slip. In particular, the magnitude 7.8 Kaikōura earthquake in New Zealand in 2016 triggered slow slip events up to 600km away from its epicentre.
It is not known why some fault segments host slow slip and others host earthquakes. Neither is it known whether the same area can change behaviour and host either slow slip or earthquakes at different times. It’s therefore important to characterise the source of slow slip, and find out what materials help create slow slip and under what conditions.
A unique opportunity
Åke Fagereng composite using map data from NOAA., Author provided
The Hikurangi subduction zone (where the Pacific ocean floor is pulled underneath the New Zealand continent) offshore New Zealand’s North Island is potentially the country’s largest earthquake fault and is a unique opportunity to investigate slow slip events. This is because slow slip here happens shallower and closer to the shoreline than anywhere else in the world.
Åke Fagereng, Author provided
The shallow slow slip events in New Zealand have been observed by onshore GPS and ocean bottom pressure sensors. Oceanic scientific drilling expeditions recently sampled sediments and installed observatories along this margin.
Stihii/Shutterstock
These International Ocean Discovery Program expeditions – which drilled to just over 1km deep in water depths of 3.5km in late 2017 and early 2018 – revealed that the seafloor rocks and sediments hosting slow slip in Hikurangi are extremely variable. The range of rocks, described in a recent Science Advances paper led by Philip Barnes of NIWA (New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research), include mudstones, sands, carbonates, and sedimentary deposits from oceanic volcanic eruptions. The seafloor samples show that the source of the slow slip is a mixture of very soft sediment and hard, solid rocks.
Åke Fagereng, Author provided
The diverse seafloor sediments are not the only variability offshore of New Zealand. The seafloor itself is also very rough, including seamounts (submarine mountains rising over a kilometre above the seafloor). This seafloor roughness also makes the fault vary depending on where along it you are.
The observations are consistent with a hypothesis where slow slip events occur in rocks that are transitional between moving steadily and moving in earthquakes. One way to think of this model is as rigid rocks interacting with softer, more ductile surroundings. Researchers using numerical simulations and laboratory experiments have also suggested that variable fault rocks can cause slow slip.
But diverse fault rock isn’t the only model for the mechanics of slow slip. Another possibility is that pressurised fluids decrease frictional resistance and slip speed along faults. It is also possible that some rocks become stronger when they move faster – so that faults start accelerating but slow down before reaching earthquake speeds.
The recent discoveries in New Zealand may be applicable to other depths and locations around the world. However, future studies will undoubtedly lead to further insights and complexities – including in the relationship between slow slip events and earthquakes.
Åke Fagereng, Reader, School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Cardiff University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Lessons for a destabilising planet: insights from the 2009 South Pacific earthquake-tsunami disaster
AAP Image/Tamara McLean
Dale Dominey-Howes, University of Sydney
Just before 7am on September 29, 2009, a magnitude 8 earthquake struck the sea floor in the central South Pacific, about 190kms south of Samoa. It was exactly the sort of earthquake – in fact, it was two almost simultaneous quakes – that create devastating tsunami.
The Earth’s crust tore apart, triggering a region-wide tsunami. Within minutes it inundated Samoa’s coastline, before rolling on to American Samoa and Tonga.
Read more:
Explainer: after an earthquake, how does a tsunami happen?
While a tsunami warning was issued by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and relayed by Samoan officials, it was not rebroadcast everywhere. Regardless, the tsunami arrived too quickly for many to escape. In Samoa, 189 people died when the tsunami reached up to 14 metres above normal sea level and many more were injured across the region. Hundreds of millions of dollars of damage was done.
Ten years on from this tragedy, it’s time to look back at the lessons we learned – and how they can help us adapt to a rapidly changing climate, which is making similar natural disasters more and more likely.
A new approach to post-disaster research
As is common after a major disaster, Samoa’s government and emergency services quickly began assessing the damage and the needs of affected communities, to direct relief and recovery efforts. The government did an excellent job given the logistical challenges that face small island developing states after such events.
It is also common for researchers from a wide range of disciplines, from earth sciences to engineering to health studies, to visit impacted areas to study the causes and effects of such disasters, and make suggestions to improve future disaster management planning and practice.
Such researcher-led field reconnaissance surveys are usually small, comprising just a few individual researchers and usually from the same discipline. These expeditions are quickly organised, and the researchers get in and out fast – too often focused on their own interests, and not working with the government or scientists of the affected country. This means serious ethical issues can arise.
Read more:
Making waves: the tsunami risk in Australia
After this earthquake and tsunami, I thought we could do better.
I proposed bringing incoming researchers from multiple disciplines, to collaborate with local communities and Samoan researchers and officials. This proposal was accepted, and I was quickly appointed to head up what became the largest ever international post-tsunami survey team.
Our team ended up comprising nearly 200 local and international participants working in multidisciplinary teams for up to a month between October and November 2009.
Critically, for the first time, the team negotiated between incoming scientists with specific questions, and local scientists and the government to ensure their research really did benefit Samoan communities.
As team leader, I reported daily to the prime minister and King of Samoa updating them on research findings, gave local TV and radio interviews on how things were going and worked with researchers to nudge field activity in directions that benefited everyone.
At the end of the survey the team provided a report to the prime minister and government on our findings. This set a new global benchmark for how post-disaster surveys could be done.
Paul Miller/AAP
The lessons we learned
As a consequence of this approach, I was appointed by the United Nations to co-lead a global working group that rewrote the handbook on how post-disaster surveys should be organised and operated.
We learned so much from the Samoan survey team, and from continuing research efforts over the last ten years following other major disasters such as the 2011 Japan earthquake-tsunami and 2013 Philippines Typhoon Haiyan disasters. Key lessons include that:
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geological studies show us these large hazard events occur much more frequently than we realised before
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natural ecosystems on which humans depend exhibit both great vulnerability and resilience to the forces of nature, but human management of those ecosystems really affects resilience
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different types of buildings experience damage and destruction in different ways. This knowledge can be used in land use zoning and improving building codes and design standards
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despite continuing public education campaigns about natural hazards and disasters, individuals, families and communities still don’t always do what emergency management agencies want them to do (for example, evacuate to high ground if you feel a strong earthquake at the coast)
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human beings are the most remarkable of species – capable of incredible resilience and generosity in the aftermath of disasters
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there is still so much we do not understand about natural hazards and disasters
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as a global community, we must work hard to reduce inequality which makes too many people vulnerable to disasters, and rise to the challenge presented by human-induced climate change.
Future disasters on a rapidly changing planet
Disasters are on the rise and climate change will only make things much worse. Earth is destabilising rapidly.
Climate change (coupled with environmental degradation and an increasing population which increases exposure to hazard events) are driving more frequent and intense disasters.
Read more:
Explainer: are natural disasters on the rise?
In fact, according to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, weather and climate related disasters have more than doubled over the last 40 years. They have said,
90% of recorded major disasters caused by natural hazards from 1995 to 2015 were linked to climate and weather including floods, storms, heatwaves and drought.
UNISDR
A heart wrenching factor is the poorest people around the world always bear the greatest burden of loss to natural disasters due to inequality and poverty. Layered on top of the particular vulnerability of poorer people to disasters, global statistics show the Asian region experiences the most disasters of all types.
Alcantara-Ayala, 2002
Earth is unique, dynamic, fragile and dangerous. Human activity is driving changes that, if not addressed soon, will result in disasters in the near future that are outside our experience and capacity to cope with.
Dale Dominey-Howes, Professor of Hazards and Disaster Risk Sciences, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A ‘seiche’ wave can outpace a tsunami, and both can be triggered by meteorites and earthquakes
Leo Roomets / Unsplash, CC BY
Craig O’Neill, Macquarie University
A catastrophic event occurred on Earth 66 million years ago. A huge meteorite struck our planet in what is now Mexico, triggering mass extinctions of the dinosaurs and most other living creatures.
A new paper shows the first recorded victims of this impact were fish and other marine animals, stranded by a wave that left them high and dry in an ancient river in North Dakota, at a site called Tanis.
For scientists unpacking the evidence around the event, a full picture of the cataclysm has involved looking into the details of planetary surface physics during giant impacts.
But beyond the first layer of fascinating results – little glass impact beads stuck in the gills of fish, for example – one really interesting aspect of this work is around how water behaves when it’s exposed to extreme forces.
If you’ve never heard of a form of wave called a seiche, this is your chance to catch up.
Waves of damage
The Chicxulub meteorite crater in coastal Mexico is strongly associated with the mass extinction of the dinosaurs (and 75% of all species), 66 million years ago.
The first victims were right at the site. Any marine creatures close to the point of impact would have been instantly vaporised (sadly leaving no fossil record), along with much of the surrounding rock.
Around the periphery, the energy of the impact melted and ejected tonnes of molten rock, which together with condensing rock vapour, formed little glass beads (“impact spherules”) that can be found in a layer around the world at this time.
The shock wave itself pulverised the adjacent rock enough to metamorphise it, forming features like “shocked quartz” – fractured quartz indicative of enormous pressures. It carried the energy equivalent of a magnitude 11 earthquake – 1,000 times more energy than the 2004 Boxing Day quake which killed almost 230,000 people.
Vast inland sea now gone
North Dakota is more than 3,000km away from the Chicxulub crater, and was a similar distance at the time of the meteorite impact event.
Separating them back then, however, was a vast inland sea that covered much of midwest USA, from Texas up to the Dakotas. Feeding into that inland sea was a river system upon which the Tanis site in North Dakota was formed. This site has preserved the earliest recorded deaths of the Chicxulub impact.
Robert A DePalma and colleagues
The site itself is unusual. The deposition of sediments can tell us about the flow of water in the river.
Most ripples (or flame structures) indicate a southerly flow of the river before and after the Tanis deposit. However, these flow indicators point the wrong way during the time the Tanis unit formed. Water was flowing upstream, fast.
At the site are also found the fossilised remains of species, like sharks and rays, that occupied brackish water, rather than the freshwater of the stream. These had to be brought inland from the sea by something, and left to die, smothered in sediment, on a riverbank.
Stranded in Dakota
The obvious candidate is an impact tsunami. Perhaps the impact of the meteorite hitting the ocean generated a huge wave that carried fish from the inland sea, and against the flow of fresh water, to leave the creatures stranded in Dakota?
But there are problems with this hypothesis. The tiny impact spherules that formed in Chicxulub can be found throughout the deposit (many clogging the gills of fish), and pockmarks in the sedimentary layers means rocks were still raining down. This means the surge of water occurred within around 15 minutes to two hours of the impact itself.
For a tsunami to travel the 3,000km from the point of impact, to the Tanis site across the inland sea, would have taken almost 18 hours. Something else killed these creatures.
The seismic waves from the impact would have travelled through the Earth much faster than a tsunami travelled across water – and arrived near Tanis between 6-13 minutes later. The authors of the Tanis study suggest these seismic waves may have triggered an unusual type of wave in the inland sea, called a seiche.
Standing waves
Seiches are standing waves in bodies of water, and are often found in large lake systems during strong winds. The winds themselves cause waves and water displacement, which can have a harmonic effect, causing the water to slosh side to side like an overfull bathtub.
However, earthquakes are also known to cause seiches. Particularly dramatic seiches are often seen in swimming pools during large quakes. The interaction of the seismic wave’s period (the time between two waves) with the timescale of waves sloshing in a pool can amplify their effect.
But seiches can affect larger bodies of water too.
During the 2011 Tohuku earthquake in Japan, seiches over 1m high were observed in Norwegian fjords more than 8,000km away. With an energy more than 1,000 times greater, the Chicxulub event could quite conceivably have generated bigger than 10 metre swells in the North American inland sea – the scale implied by the deposition of the Tanis site.
Given a seiche can be driven by seismic waves, it’s conceivable that one drove the surge that stranded marine creatures at Tanis, resulting in the short time between the impact debris and the surge deposit.
Still lots of questions
But a lot remains unclear regarding exactly what did happen 66 million years ago.
Could the fish stranding have been driven by the first seismic activity to appear at Tanis (the P and S waves in science parlance, which travel through the interior of the Earth, arriving at Tanis 6 and 10 minutes after impact, respectively), or the more destructive but slower surface waves at the top of the Earth’s crust, which arrived 13 minutes after impact?
How might seiche waves have interacted with global hurricane-strength wind storms caused by the impact?
Would the period of sloshing of a seiche be consistent with the scale of the inland sea? (The inland sea was much larger than most lakes seiches are traditionally observed in – and may or may not have been open to the ocean). Given so little is really known about the dimensions of the inland sea, this is hard to constrain.
The Tanis site has given us an incredible window into the first few hours of a mass-extinction. But it has also highlighted how little we have probed into the fatal surface physics of these extreme events.
Craig O’Neill, Director of the Macquarie Planetary Research Centre/Associate Professor in Geodynamics, Macquarie University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Earthquakes Are Hard to Predict
Satellite measurements of slow ground movements may provide a better tool for earthquake forecasting
Simon Lamb, CC BY-ND
Simon Lamb, Victoria University of Wellington
It was a few minutes past midnight on 14 November 2016, and I was drifting into sleep in Wellington, New Zealand, when a sudden jolt began rocking the bed violently back and forth. I knew immediately this was a big one. In fact, I had just experienced the magnitude 7.8 Kaikoura earthquake.
Our research, published today, shows how the slow build-up to this earthquake, recorded by satellite GPS measurements, predicted what it would be like. This could potentially provide a better tool for earthquake forecasting.
Read more:
New Zealand’s Alpine Fault reveals extreme underground heat and fluid pressure
Shattering the landscape
The day after the quake, I heard there had been huge surface breaks in a region extending for more than 170 km along the eastern part of the northern South Island. In some places, the ground had shifted by 10 metres, resulting in a complex pattern of fault ruptures.
In effect, the region had been shattered, much like a fractured sheet of glass. The last time anything like this had happened was more than 150 years ago, in 1855.
Quite independently, I had been analysing another extraordinary feature of New Zealand. Over the past century or so, land surveyors had revealed that the landscape is moving all the time, slowly changing shape.
These movements are no more than a few centimetres each year – but they build with time, relentlessly driven by the same forces that move the Earth’s tectonic plates. Like any stiff material subjected to excessive stress, the landscape will eventually break, triggering an earthquake.
I was studying measurements made with state-of-the-art global positioning system (GPS) techniques – and they recorded in great detail the build-up to the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake over the previous two decades.
A mobile crust
GPS measurements for regions at the edges of the tectonic plates, such as New Zealand, have become widely available in the last 15 years or so. Here, the outer part of the Earth (the crust) is broken up by faults into numerous small blocks that are moving over geological time. But it is widely thought that even over periods as short as a few decades, the GPS measurements still record the motion of these blocks.
Simon Lamb, CC BY
The idea is that at the surface, where the rocks are cold and strong, a fault only moves in sudden shifts during earthquakes, with long intervening periods of inactivity when it is effectively “locked”. During the locked phase, the rocks behave like a piece of elastic, slowly changing shape over a wide region without breaking.
But deeper down, where the rocks are much hotter, there is the possibility that the fault is slowly slipping all the time, gradually adding to the forces in the overlying rocks until the elastic part suddenly breaks. In this case, the GPS measurements could tell us something about how deep one has to go to reach this slipping region, and how fast it is moving.
From this, one could potentially estimate how frequently each fault is likely to rupture during an earthquake, and how big that rupture will be – in other words, the “when and what” of an earthquake. But to achieve this understanding, we would need to consider every major fault when analysing the GPS data.
Invisible faults
Current earthquake forecasting “reverse engineers” past distortions of the Earth’s surface by finding all the faults that could trigger an earthquake, working out their earthquake histories and projecting this pattern into the future in a computer model. But there are some big challenges.
The most obvious is that it is probably impossible to characterise every fault. They are too numerous and many are not visible at the surface. In fact, most historical earthquakes have occurred on faults that were not known before they ruptured.
Our analysis of the GPS measurements has revealed a more fundamental problem that at the same time opens new avenues for earthquake forecasting. Working with statistician Richard Arnold and geophysicist and modeller James Moore, we found the GPS measurements could be better explained if the numerous faults that might rupture in earthquakes were simply ignored. In other words, surface faults seemed to be invisible when looking at the slow movements recorded by GPS.
There was only one fault that mattered – the megathrust that runs under much of New Zealand. It separates the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates and only reaches the surface underwater, about 50 to 100km offshore. Prior to the Kaikoura earthquake, the megathrust was locked at depths shallower than about 30km. Here, the overlying Australian plate had been slowly changing shape like a single piece of elastic.
Simon Lamb, CC BY
The pacemaker for future quakes
In the conventional view, every big fault has its own inbuilt earthquake driver or pacemaker – the continuously slipping part of the fault deep in the crust. But our analysis suggests that these faults play no role in the driving mechanism of an earthquake, and the pacemaker is the underlying megathrust.
We think the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake provides the vital clue that we are right. The key observation is that numerous ruptures were involved, busting up the boundary between the two plates in a zone that ran more-or-less parallel to the line of locking on the underlying megathrust. This is exactly what we would anticipate if the slow build-up in stress was only driven by slip on the megathrust and not the deeper parts of individual crustal faults.
I remember once watching a documentary about the making of the Boeing 777 aircraft. The engineers were very confident about its design limits under flying conditions, but the Civil Aviation Authority wanted it tested to destruction. In one test, the vast wings were twisted so that their tips arced up to the sky at a weird angle. Suddenly, there was a bang and the wings snapped, greeted by loud cheering because this had occurred almost exactly when predicted. But the details of how this happened, such as where the cracks of metal fatigue twisted the metal, were something that only the experiment could show.
I think this is a good analogy for realistic goals with earthquake prediction. The Herculean task of identifying every fault and its past earthquake history may be of only limited use. In fact, it is becoming clear that earthquake ruptures on individual faults are far from regular. Big faults may never rupture in one go, but bit by bit together with many other faults.
But it might well be possible to forecast when there will be severe shaking in a region near you – surely something that is equally as valuable.
Simon Lamb, Associate Professor in Geophysics, Victoria University of Wellington
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Kevin's Walk on the Wild Side 
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