iPlex Lunch winter-2016

A tectono-geomorphic study of the Alpine Fault, New Zealand

This talk will encompass recent efforts to improve the understanding of California's sister plate boundary, the active continental strike-slip Alpine Fault in New Zealand. Topics covered include characterizing fault rocks to understand earthquake behavior, utilizing LiDAR data to reveal surface rupture distribution and slip partitioning, exploiting a unique regional 8km strike-slip offset to determine high-precision fault slip rates, and assessing the role very large landslides play on Alpine Fault seismic hazard. Together these studies paint a view of the Alpine Fault as a highly-localized, long-lived, very weak locus of plate boundary motion that has had relatively constant spatio-temporal displacement rates in the latter part of its history, ruptures in hazardous large-magnitude earthquakes with considerable coseismic geomorphic effects, and exerts a first-order control on landscape evolution of the South Island. Throughout the talk I will draw on comparisons to the San Andreas Fault System, highlighting what the comparatively simple Alpine Fault can possibly tell us about our messy, complex world in southern California.