Speaker: Dr. Diego Melgar Moctezuma
Seminar Title: Geophysical modeling meets paleoseismology: can we know the details of past Cascadia earthquakes?
Abstract: Was the 1700 Cascadia earthquake a single plate boundary rupturing event? Or was it a series of ruptures closely spaced in time? What were the details of the slip distributions during those events? These are fundamental questions which have persisted throughout the decades of study of the Cascadia subduction zone (CSZ). Answers to them impact how we think of the long term seimsotectonic behavior of the margin and how we quantify its earthquake and tsunami hazards. In this talk I will showcase an approach which uses computationally efficient rupture modeling to explore which kinds of earthquakes are parsimonious with the vast and diverse paleoseismic record at the CSZ. I will conclude that we do not know beyond a reasonable doubt that 1700 was a single event and that a sequence of ruptures should still be considered possible.
Host: Demian Gomez and Yanlan Liu
