The 2016 Mw 7.8 Kaikoura Earthquake: Perspectives from Earthquake Geology into Seismic Hazard

Robert M. Langridge, Pilar Villamor, Nicola Litchfield, Russ J. Van Dissen, Kate Clark, William Ries, Jesse Kearse, Timothy Little, Matthew C. Gerstenberger, Tatiana Goded, & the Kaikoura Earthquake Response Team

Published July 31, 2017, SCEC Contribution #7370, 2017 SCEC Annual Meeting Talk on Tue 14:00

The 14 November 2016 (local time) Mw 7.8 Kaikōura earthquake, New Zealand is an exceptional example of multi-fault rupture and efforts to document the extent and character of fault rupture will provide a valuable case study of end-member fault rupture complexity. Surface rupture occurred on at least 14 named South Island faults with co-seismic surface slip of ≥1.5 m between North Canterbury, Marlborough and Cook Strait broadly spanning a plate boundary transition from oblique subduction to continental collision. The pattern of surface faulting is highly complex and occurred over a length of c. 180 km from mountain to coastal and submarine environments. There are many lessons for us to take from this event, as our observations show there was highly variable structural styles of rupture, jumps across tectonic domains and exceptional stepover sizes between ruptures, and the rupture of faults with slip rates and recurrence intervals varying by an order of magnitude all rupturing in the single event. These provide several important implications for seismic hazard modelling of multi-segment ruptures. The purpose of this talk will be to highlight the scale and complexity of surface ruptures and coastal deformation, with an emphasis on the high-slip Papatea, Kekerengu and Jordan faults in the northern part of the fault rupture zone. We will describe the variety of new techniques to map fault ruptures and understand microblock tectonics, and describe how observations from earthquake geology are being used to update seismic hazard models in the northern South Island.

Key Words
2016 Kaikoura earthquake, multi-fault rupture

Citation
Langridge, R. M., Villamor, P., Litchfield, N., Van Dissen, R. J., Clark, K., Ries, W., Kearse, J., Little, T., Gerstenberger, M. C., Goded, T., & Response Team, t. (2017, 07). The 2016 Mw 7.8 Kaikoura Earthquake: Perspectives from Earthquake Geology into Seismic Hazard. Oral Presentation at 2017 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP)