Earthquake supercycles inferred from sea-level changes recorded in the corals of West Sumatra.
Records of relative sea-level change extracted from corals of the Mentawai islands, Sumatra, imply that this 700-kilometer-long section of the Sunda megathrust has generated broadly similar sequences of great earthquakes about every two centuries for at least the past 700 years. The moment magnitude 8.4 earthquake of September 2007 represents the first in a series of large partial failures of the Mentawai section that will probably be completed within the next several decades.
Sieh
Kerry
K
Tectonics Observatory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA. sieh@ntu.edu.sg
Natawidjaja
Danny H
DH
Meltzner
Aron J
AJ
Shen
Chuan-Chou
CC
Cheng
Hai
H
Li
Kuei-Shu
KS
Suwargadi
Bambang W
BW
Galetzka
John
J
Philibosian
Belle
B
Edwards
R Lawrence
RL