Long aftershock sequences within continents and implications for earthquake hazard assessment

Seth Stein () and Mian Liu
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Seth Stein: Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA
Mian Liu: University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA

Nature, 2009, vol. 462, issue 7269, 87-89

Abstract: Aftershock or small quake? The assessment of earthquake hazards within continents relies in large part on the assumption that the locations of small earthquakes in the historical record reflect continuing deformation that will cause future large earthquakes. However, this assumption is beginning to look suspect. As demonstrated by the Wenchuan earthquake of May 2008, faults with low recent seismicity are not immune from large earthquakes. And now Seth Stein and Mian Liu argue that many recent intraplate earthquakes are probably aftershocks of large earthquakes that occurred hundreds of years ago, so do not point to the location of future large earthquakes. Stein and Liu present a simple model predicting that the duration of aftershock sequences varies inversely with the rate at which faults are loaded. Thus the common practice of treating continental earthquakes as steady-state seismicity may overestimate the hazard in currently active areas and underestimate it elsewhere.

Date: 2009
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DOI: 10.1038/nature08502

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