Oral Presentation

Large earthquakes have a high likelihood of occurring in California in the next 30 years. Most of the faults these earthquakes will rupture are locked during the times between large events, but some noticeably creep, slowly slipping much of the time. The most famous California creeping fault with the fastest creep rate relative to its long-term slip rate is a section of the San Andreas fault in central California. It regularly produces magnitude 6 earthquakes at its southern end, at Parkfield, and at least magnitude 5 earthquakes at its northern end, at San Juan Bautista. Whereas the margins of the creeping central San Andreas fault do not expose as many people to seismic hazard, another part of the San Andreas fault system, the creeping Hayward fault and its connected companions to the north and to the south, the Rodgers Creek and Calaveras faults, respectively, occur in a densely populated region and therefore pose significant seismic risk. I present an overview of what we know so far about large earthquakes, creeping faults, and their strong ground motions in general, and with a focus on the data-rich Hayward-Rodgers Creek-Calaveras faults setting, show how we can use computational simulations to produce scenarios of these earthquakes and the resulting strong ground motions.