title: Major earthquakes occur regularly on an isolated plate boundary fault.
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.
authors: GNS Science, Post Office Box 30-368, Lower Hutt 5040, New Zealand. k.berryman@gns.cri.nz
authors: Kelvin R
authors: KR
authors: Berryman
authors: Ursula A
authors: UA
authors: Cochran
authors: Kate J
authors: KJ
authors: Clark
authors: Glenn P
authors: GP
authors: Biasi
authors: Robert M
authors: RM
authors: Langridge
authors: Pilar
authors: P
authors: Villamor