Continuous Global Positioning System sites in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, and northwestern Washington state, USA, have been moving landward as a result of the locked state of the Cascadia subduction fault offshore. In the summer of 1999, a cluster of seven sites briefly reversed their direction of motion. No seismicity was associated with this event. The sudden displacements are best...

An extensive analysis of the strong ground motion Mexican data base was conducted using Soft Computing (SC) techniques. A Neural Network NN is used to estimate both orthogonal components of the horizontal (PGA h ) and vertical (PGA v ) peak ground accelerations measured at rock sites during Mexican subduction zone earthquakes. The work discusses the development, training, and testing of this ne...

Active microplate boundaries in ocean-continent subduction zones may induce deformation of the overlying plate and spatial or geochemical variations in the volcanic arc. We discuss two modern cases. The first is the South Gorda-Juan de Fuca plate boundary in the Cascadia subduction zone, where there is little or no effect on the overriding plate and the oceanic plate takes up much of the deform...

S U M M A R Y Historical reports of an earthquake in Tonga in 1865 November identify it as the only event from that subduction zone which generated a far-field tsunami observable without instruments. Run-up heights reached 2 m in Rarotonga and 80 cm in the Marquesas Islands. Hydrodynamic simulations require a moment of 4 × 1028 dyn cm, a value significantly larger than previous estimates of the...

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Southern Peru is located in the northern Central Andes, which is the highest plateau along an active subduction zone. In this region, the Nazca slab changes from normal to flat subduction, with the associated Holocene volcanism ceasing above the flat subduction regime. We use 6 s to 67 s period surface wave signals from ambient noise cross-correlations and ...

Studies of past sea-level markers are commonly used to unveil the tectonic history and seismic behavior of subduction zones. We present new evidence on vertical motions of the Hellenic subduction zone as resulting from a suite of Late Pleistocene - Holocene shorelines in western Crete (Greece). Shoreline ages obtained by AMS radiocarbon dating of seashells, together with the reappraisal of shor...

S U M M A R Y Earthquakes occurring in the Indonesian subduction zone recorded in the cratonic regions of northern Australia have long, high frequency coda associated with both P and Swaves. Similar behaviour is seen for earthquakes within Australia on paths within the cratonic regions. The complex character of the coda and its rapid spatial variation indicate that the high frequency waves have...

Recent geochemical studies of uranium-thorium series disequilibrium in rocks from subduction zones require magmas to be transported through the mantle from just above the subducting slab to the surface in as little as approximately 30,000 years. We present a series of laboratory experiments that investigate the characteristic time scales and flow patterns of the diapiric upwelling model of subd...

Central Mexico is the site of an enigmatic zone of flat subduction. The general geometry of the subducting slab has been known for some time and is characterized by a horizontal zone bounded on either side by two moderately dipping sections. We systematically evaluate proposed hypotheses for shallow subduction in Mexico based on the spatial and temporal evidence, and we find no simple or obviou...