A Global Database of Strike-Slip Surface Ruptures

Nadine G. Reitman, & Rich Briggs

Submitted August 30, 2026, SCEC Contribution #15175, 2026 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #TBD

Every surface-rupturing earthquake provides a unique opportunity to refine understanding of earthquake behavior, how the crust breaks, and how earthquakes are related. These empirical earthquake data form the backbone of earthquake scaling relationships and provide surface slip distributions, constraints on rupture behavior (e.g., jump distances between fault sections), and evidence to support decisions made in earthquake rupture forecasts for seismic hazard models. These insights generally do not come from a single earthquake, since each earthquake has its own eccentricities, but are derived from databases of many ruptures, which allow us to tamp down the noise of individual ruptures to draw inferences about global earthquake behavior.

Here we present a database of >100 continental, strike-slip surface ruptures, the majority with both surface rupture mapping and surface slip distributions. The database includes ruptures Mw 5.0-8.5 that occurred from 1630-2026 CE, plus a few paleoseismic events. The data are primarily based on fieldwork or high-resolution satellite images, with some constraints from InSAR. We aim to include all surface ruptures with existing data, even if those data are coarse or sparse, and therefore we take a “more the merrier” approach to including ruptures. To this end, we include oblique ruptures with more horizontal than vertical slip and paleoseismic ruptures with detailed slip distributions and reasonable estimates of rupture length. This database builds on prior compilations by Wesnousky (2008), Biasi & Wesnousky (2016), Baize et al. (2019), Nurminen et al. (2022), Reitman et al., (2022), and Sarmiento et al. (2025), more than doubling the number of strike-slip earthquakes with slip distributions and rupture maps. From preliminary analysis, we calculate updated scaling relationships for continental strike-slip earthquakes, provide an updated list of overlapping ruptures (building on Schwartz, 2018), and determine the most common best-fit shapes of surface slip distributions.

Key Words
surface rupture, strike-slip fault, database

Citation
Reitman, N. G., & Briggs, R. (2026, 08). A Global Database of Strike-Slip Surface Ruptures. Poster Presentation at 2026 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Earthquake Geology