Geology topics

M. Shishikura

Publications and source records attributed to M. Shishikura.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

USGS2006

Recurrence of postseismic coastal uplift, Kuril subduction zone, Japan

Coastal stratigraphy of eastern Hokkaido indicates that decimeters of coastal uplitt occurred repeatedly m the late Holocene. Employing radiocarbon dating and tephrochronology, we identify along a 100 km length of the Kuril subduction zone six uplift events since ???2,800 years B.P. Uplift events occur at the same frequency as unusually high tsunamis. Each coastal uplift event, which occurs on average every 500 years, is the product of decade-long post seismic deep slip on the down dip extension of the seismogenic plate boundary following an offshore multi-segment earthquake that generates unusually high tsunamis. Copyright 2006 by the American Geophysical Union.

Geophysical Research Letters↗

USGS2005

Predecessors of the giant 1960 Chile earthquake

It is commonly thought that the longer the time since last earthquake, the larger the next earthquake's slip will be. But this logical predictor of earthquake size, unsuccessful for large earthquakes on a strike-slip fault, fails also with the giant 1960 Chile earthquake of magnitude 9.5 (ref. 3). Although the time since the preceding earthquake spanned 123 years (refs 4, 5), the estimated slip in 1960, which occurred on a fault between the Nazca and South American tectonic plates, equalled 250-350 years' worth of the plate motion. Thus the average interval between such giant earthquakes on this fault should span several centuries. Here we present evidence that such long intervals were indeed typical of the last two millennia. We use buried soils and sand layers as records of tectonic subsidence and tsunami inundation at an estuary midway along the 1960 rupture. In these records, the 1960 earthquake ended a recurrence interval that had begun almost four centuries before, with an earthquake documented by Spanish conquistadors in 1575. Two later earthquakes, in 1737 and 1837, produced little if any subsidence or tsunami at the estuary and they therefore probably left the fault partly loaded with accumulated plate motion that the 1960 earthquake then expended. ?? 2005 Nature Publishing Group.

Nature↗

USGS2004

Transient uplift after a 17th-century earthquake along the kuril subduction zone

In eastern Hokkaido, 60 to 80 kilometers above a subducting oceanic plate, tidal mudflats changed into freshwater forests during the first decades after a 17th-century tsunami. The mudflats gradually rose by a meter, as judged from fossil diatom assemblages. Both the tsunami and the ensuing uplift exceeded any in the region's 200 years of written history, and both resulted from a shallow plate-boundary earthquake of unusually large size along the Kuril subduction zone. This earthquake probably induced more creep farther down the plate boundary than did any of the region's historical events.

Science↗