1.3.

1 Patterns in Recurrence

The recurrence (timing) of paleoearthquakes is a critical characteristic in assessing the hazard

from large earthquakes. In active tectonic regions the recurrence period of moderate to large
earthquakes may be so short that they pose a greater hazard than the largest earthquakes, which
occur much less frequently. In contrast, in regions where fault slip rates are low, the recurrence
intervals for large earthquakes may be so long that the earthquakes are not a significant hazard
for facilities with design lives of less than 100 years.

The assumption that earthquakes of roughly the same size occur with regular recurrence has been
attractive and powerful in the sense that it allows calculation of average recurrence intervals from
short- or long-term deformation (slip) rates. But this assumption may not apply to the long-term
history of many faults; historical records of large earthquakes show a great deal of variability in their
spatial and temporal patterns of recurrence. In the plate-boundary regions of the Pacific, such
variability appears to be the rule rather than the exception (Thatcher, 1990). Not surprisingly, the
results of some of the most detailed paleoseismology studies mirror those of the historical record:
as the number and precision of ages for past earthquakes increase recurrence patterns become more
complex (e.g., McCalpin and Nishenko, 1996; Biasi et al., 2002). The degree of earthquake
clustering and the extent to which earthquakes on one fault (or segment) trigger earthquakes on
adjacent faults or segments (termed contagion by Perkins, 1987; and earthquake stress triggering
by Stein
et al., 1997) are of increasing concern in paleoseismology studies (Chapter 9, See Books companion
web site).

The relations among fault slip rates, recurrence patterns, and the time interval of observations
are nicely illustrated by Pierce (1986; Figure 1.4). Depending on the length and age of the
window of observation, slip rates (and hence inferred earthquake recurrence and perceived
hazard) may vary by an order of magnitude. Figure 1.4 also clearly illustrates the importance of
attempting to date individual earthquakes when assessing earthquake hazards. Without multiple
ages that span much of the recent history of a fault there is little hope of accurately forecasting
its future activity.
Earthquake recurrence may also have a significant impact on the types of evidence that can be
used to infer paleoearthquakes. Where large earthquakes occur frequently, episodic shaking is
commonly the dominant process in producing some types of slope or ground failures (Chapter
8). In such highly active areas these features can be reasonably inferred to have been caused by
earthquakes. For example, recent work in
New Zealand shows strong correlations between the times of major historical earthquakes on the
Alpine fault and ages for rockfall events derived from lichen diameter measurements (Bull et al.,
1994; Bull and Brandon, 1998). But where earthquakes are smaller or much less frequent than
along major fault zones with high slip rates, nontectonic processes may produce most slope and
ground failures. In another example,
if great earthquakes occur every few hundred years off the coast of central western North
America, then most abruptly buried tidal-marsh soils and continental-shelf turbidites in the region
were probably produced during such earthquakes. However, if great earthquake recurrence was a
thousand or more years, then nonseismic processes that produce similar features would be much
more difficult to distinguish from evidence of great earthquakes (Nelson et al., 1996; Goldfinger
et al., 2008; Chapter 5).

1.4 Estimating the Magnitude of Prehistoric Earthquakes

Both primary and secondary evidence are used to estimate the magnitude of paleoearthquakes.
Paleomagnitude estimates involve many assumptions, and large errors are often associated with the
many parameters that need to be measured in order to estimate magnitudes. The best approach is to
use several methods to estimate magnitudes. For a more detailed discussion of this topic see
(Chapter 9, See Books companion web site).
Because primary evidence is produced directly by fault rupture, the geographic distribution of
primary evidence is related to the area of fault rupture and, hence, to earthquake magnitude.
The length of fault surface rupture is the parameter most commonly used to estimate magnitude
(Figure 1.6). Estimates of the surface rupture length during past earthquakes are compared to
compilations of worldwide data on surface rupture lengths during historical earthquakes to
estimate ranges of earthquake magnitudes for particular paleoearthquakes (Wells and
Coppersmith, 1994; Stirling et al., 2002). Variations on this procedure involve estimating the
area of the fault plane that slipped during past ruptures or the seismic moment, a measure of
the total energy released during the earthquake.

Primary evidence that reflects the relative amount of slip on faults or the folding of surfaces
above faults may also be used to estimate magnitude. As with fault length, these methods rely
on empirical comparisons with amounts of deformation recorded during historical earthquakes
of different magnitudes (Figure 1.6). Examples include use of the amount of lateral offset of
young stream channels, the thickness of colluvial wedges in fault exposures, or the amount of
uplift of former shorelines to distinguish Mw 6 earthquakes from earthquakes of Mw 78
(Chapters 36). Hemphill-Haley and Weldon (1999) showhow such displacement
measurements can be statistically related to paleoearthquake magnitude.
In thepast decade, the complex relations among shallow surface-rupturing faults, variable
geomorphic site parameters and processes, and slip on deeper master faults, especially from
one earthquake to the next, make even empirical estimates of paleoearthquake magnitude from
measurements of surface rupture or fold growth uncertain (e.g., Kelsey et al., 2008).

Secondary evidence is less commonly used to infer paleomagnitudes than primary evidence,
but in some cases it may provide more accurate estimates of magnitude than primary evidence.
More importantly, secondary evidence is the only evidence available for those earthquakes in
which the seismogenic fault does not rupture or fold the surface. Mapping the distribution of
secondary evidence, such as liquefaction features or earthquake-induced landslides, over a large
area may reveal a pattern of variable ground motion intensity. From the areal extent of the
features and their relative size, paleoearthquake magnitude may be inferred using empirical
methods based on historical observations (Figure 1.6; Chapters 7 and 8). In addition,
engineering-based static and dynamic analyses (e.g., a pseudostatic limit equilibrium analysis of
a landslide) of the failed material can yield estimates of shaking strength that are independent
of historicalempirical correlations.

The accuracy of estimating magnitudes from both primary and secondary features is dependent
on the assumption that correlated features are the product of the same paleoearthquake. But
several moderate- magnitude paleoearthquakes closely spaced in time may have created features
that, after several hundred or thousand years, appear to be the product of one large
paleoearthquake. The Rainbow Mountain Fairview PeakDixie Valley (Nevada) earthquake
sequence of 1954 (Mw 6.2, 6.5; Mw 7.2; Mw 6.7) created three zones of fault scarps in 6
months; the latter two surface ruptures were only 4 min apart (Doser and Smith, 1989;
Hodgkinson et al., 1996; Caskey et al., 2004). If the entire 123 km-long zone of FairviewDixie
scarps were attributed to a single earthquake in some future paleoseismic study, empirical
relations would indicate a single Mw 7.8 earthquake. Multiple great earthquakes (Mw > 7.8)
have also uplifted or subsided many tens of kilometers of coast as little as a few minutes to a
few months apart (e.g., Ando, 1975; Briggs et al., 2007). Thus, even with significant
improvements in dating precision and accuracy, paleoseismological methods will rarely show
whether widespread primary or secondary evidence was produced by one very large earthquake
or a series of smaller earthquakes occurring less than a few decades apart.
1.5 The Early Development of Paleoseismology, 18901980

Not surprisingly, paleoseismology developed first and has grown fastest in countries where
rates of tectonic processes are high and where geologic investigations are supported by a
sophisticated scientific infrastructure. Our brief outline of some early developments of
paleoseismology focuses on some of the significant advances in countries such as the United
States, Japan, Russia, and New Zealand.

The notion that the dramatic topography of some regions was created little by little during
repeated earthquakes has a long history, extending through most of the current millennium
(Vita-Finzi, 1986, p. 9; Bonilla, 1991). The main impetus to understand the history of recent
faults arose in the late 1800s and early 1900s from detailed accounts of historical ruptures
along active fault zones (Richter, 1958). For example, McKay (1886) recognized that scarps
produced by earthquakes in New Zealand in 1848 and 1855 were identical to larger fault-zone
features with similar origins, and ruptures produced by the 1891 Nobi earthquake in central
Japan led Koto (1893) to similar conclusions. Other earthquakes of this period that stimulated
much initial paleoseismic research include the 1906 San Francisco event in the
United States (Lawson et al., 1908), the Assam, India, earthquake of 1897 (Oldham, 1899), and
the
1923 Kanto earthquake in central Japan (Kaizuka, 1976).

North American investigators frequently look back to the work of Gilbert (1890, pp. 340362;
1928) who used a number of modern paleoseismic concepts to interpret normal fault scarps along
the Wasatch fault in Utah (Wallace, 1980b; Machette and Scott, 1988). To Gilbert, variable fault
scarp heights on different alluvial surfaces suggested multiple surface faulting events. By
measuring fault scarp heights, he also estimated fault displacement per event and deduced that
faulting events were no more frequent during the late Pleistocene high stand of pluvial Lake
Bonneville than during its Holocene low stand. His letter to the inhabitants of Salt Lake City, Utah
(Gilbert, 1884), on the inevitability of future large earthquakes is one of the first earthquake
forecasts based on prehistoric, rather than historical, seismicity. Wallace and Scott (1996)
consider Gilbert to be the father of paleoseismology in the USA (although that same
appellation was applied to Wallace himself by many, including us in the first edition of this book,
Figure 1.8).

Studies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made little attempt to relate
earthquake features, which had been carefully described by early geologists, to a specific number
of, or magnitude of, paleoearthquakes (Wallace, 1980b). Seismology was still a developing
science and could not provide much theoretical support for descriptive fault studies.

In the period during and shortly after the two world wars most paleoseismic studies remained
largely descriptive and focused on large landforms, such as fault scarps and raised alluvial and
marine terraces. Surface faulting during the 1929 Murchison earthquake (Henderson, 1937)
prodded New Zealand geologists into a concerted search for evidence of prehistoric faulting
(e.g., Speight, 1938; Cotton, 1950) that culminated in several papers summarizing the
geomorphic evidence of paleoseismicity throughout New Zealand (Wellman, 1952, 1953, 1955;
Bowen, 1954; Lensen, 1958). In a similar way, Kuno (1936) recognized that the 1-km offset of
Pleistocene features on the Tanna fault in Japan was of a similar nature to the 2- to 3-m offset
created during the 1930 Idu earthquake. The height and distribution of marine terraces in Japan
were used to infer several scales of active folding in Japan during this period (Otuka, 1932),
and interseismic crustal movements were distinguished from coseismic movements (Yamasaki
and Tada, 1928). Coastal studies of uplift of shorelines and tilting of marine terraces, which
began following the 1923 Kanto earthquake (Kaizuka, 1993), progressed rapidly in the decades
after the subduction-zone earthquakes of 1946 along the Nankai trough (e.g., Sugimura and
Naruse, 1954; Yoshikawa et al., 1964). In Russia, Florensov and Solonenko (1963, 1965) used
their observations on the rupture trace of the
1957 Gobi-Altai earthquake (Mw 8.1) with their mapping of late Quaternary fault scarps in
Russia and Mongolia to infer that some fault-zone landforms record identifiable
paleoearthquakes. In a
similar study in Nevada, USA, Slemmons (1957) mapped normal fault scarps along the trace of
the Dixie ValleyFairview Peak earthquakes of 1954. In 1958 Richter briefly summarized
much of this early work in his book Elementary Seismology.

Paleoseismology emerged as a distinct discipline during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Florensov
(1960) and Solonenko (1962, 1970, 1973) were among the first to propose a paleoseismogeological
method, with an emphasis on the traces of prehistoric surface faulting or
paleoseismodislocations and seismo-gravitational failures. The word paleoseismicity first
appeared in the title of an English-language article about fault plane microgrooves (Engelder, 1974)
and the term was being used in Japanese publications (e.g., Huzita and Ota, 1977, p. 135) shortly
after. This was the beginning of the modern period of paleoseismology in the sense that
stratigraphic and geomorphic evidence were used to interpret the characteristics of individual
prehistoric earthquakes. For example, slip rates were calculated from the cumulative
displacements of landforms of approximately known age, in settings ranging from strike-slip offset
of river terraces (Lensen, 1968) to uplift of marine terraces during subduction-zone earthquakes
(Yoshikawa et al., 1964). The displacements and rupture lengths observed in historical
earthquakes were used to infer the magnitudes of paleoearthquakes, based on the heights and
lengths of faults scarps (Slemmons, 1977; Bonilla et al., 1984). Studies of subduction-zone
features during this period in Japan (Ota, 1975; Matsuda et al., 1978; Nakata et al., 1979) and
documentation of the effects of the great earthquakes of 1960 (Plafker and Savage, 1970; Kaizuka
et al., 1973) and 1964 (Plafker, 1965, 1969b, 1972; Plafker and Rubin, 1978) in Alaska and Chile
led to advances in the understanding of subducting plate boundaries that have strongly influenced
paleoseismic studies since
that time. In the continental United States in the 1960s, early work on the San Andreas fault by
Wallace (1970) and others, the 1971 San Fernando earthquake (Mw 6.6) in southern California and
trenches across the surface ruptures (Heath and Leighton, 1973), and the discovery of young faults in
excavations during construction of nuclear power plants and other large facilities in California spurred
many investigations into the stratigraphic expression of Quaternary faulting.

In his Presidential Address to the Geological Society of America in 1975, Clarence Allen provided
the first overview to a wide audience of paleoseismic methods and assumptions (Allen, 1975: . . .
the most important single contribution to gaining a better understanding of long-term seismicity,
which is critical to the siting and design of safe structures and to the establishment of realistic
building codes, is to learn more, region by region, of the late Quaternary history of deformation, and
particularly that of the Holocene epoch. More specifically, I see a special need for geomorphological
studies in these regions, better and more radiometric dates, and accurate detailed geological field
mapping that utilizes trenches and boreholes as well as surface exposures. Studies of these kinds, in
my opinion, offer the best hope of inferring what has happened during earthquakes within the very
recent geologic past, and therefore what is likely to happen again in the near future. Allen and
Scott (2002) provide the historical background for this address.

During the late 1970s the development of modern paleoseismology in the United States was
strongly influenced by Siehs (1978a,b) detailed geomorphic and stratigraphic work on the San
Andreas fault in California. Although Sieh was not the first to use trenches to expose a fault zone
(e.g., Converse, Davis and Associates, 1968; Clark et al., 1972), he was the first to demonstrate
to a wide audience that earthquake chronologies comparable to some of those based on historical
records could be reconstructed through the meticulous mapping and dating of trench-wall
sediments. Meehan (1984) and Bonilla (1991) describe these early days of paleoseismology in the
United States, particularly the extensive efforts made to derive paleoearthquake magnitude,
displacement, and recurrence data from fault-zone exposures.