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Coseismic strike slip at a point during the last four earthquakes on the Wellington fault near Wellington, New Zealand

2010; American Geophysical Union; Volume: 115; Issue: B5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1029/2009jb006589

2156-2202

Timothy A. Little, Russ Van Dissen, U. Rieser, Euan Smith, R. M. Langridge,

Geological and Geophysical Studies Worldwide

We analyze progressively displaced late Quaternary (<12 ka) fluvial terraces along the Wellington fault, near Wellington, New Zealand. Optically stimulated luminescence dating indicates that degradational terraces were produced at a rate of about one terrace per 1000 years, similar to the rate of earthquake surface rupturing. Along the Hutt River near Te Marua, we measured the strike slip of 15 terrace risers and paleochannels on the lowest 8 of these terraces, of Holocene age. The river, after earthquakes, was generally capable of smoothing its faulted riverbanks. The dextral offsets appear to fall into several groupings that record slip accumulation during the last four earthquakes. We calculate a mean single‐event slip of 5.0 ± 0.24 m (95% confidence) with an RMS scatter (1 σ ) of slips about the mean of ±1.5 m. The coefficient of variation (CV) of single‐event slip is thus 0.30. This CV is slightly less than a recently compiled global average for point measurements on strike‐slip faults, suggesting that the southernmost Wellington fault has behaved in a more nearly characteristic way. We speculate that recent large earthquake ruptures have been bounded on their southern end by the Wellington fault's offshore fault termination and perhaps on their northern end by a ∼2 km wide releasing step over. Such persistent sources of rupture arrest might have led to a relative uniformity of rupture dimensions and slip amounts. We infer a late Holocene dextral slip rate of ≥4.5 ± 0.4 mm/yr (1 σ ) and <8.2 mm/yr, and a mean earthquake recurrence interval of ∼610–1100 years.