To date, the parameters that determine the rupture area of great subduction zone earthquakes remain contentious. On 1 April 2014, the Mw 8.1 Iquique earthquake ruptured a portion of the well-recognized northern Chile seismic gap but left large highly coupled areas un-ruptured. Marine seismic reflection and swath bathymetric data indicate that structural variations in the subducting Nazca Plate ...

In the forearc region, aqueous fluids are released from the subducting slab at a rate depending on its thermal state. Escaping fluids tend to rise vertically unless they meet permeability barriers such as the deformed plate interface or the Moho of the overriding plate. Channeling of fluids along the plate interface and Moho may result in fluid overpressure in the oceanic crust, precipitation o...

[1] Coastal stratigraphy of eastern Hokkaido indicates that decimeters of coastal uplift occurred repeatedly in the late Holocene. Employing radiocarbon dating and tephrochronology, we identify along a 100 km length of the Kuril subduction zone six uplift events since 2,800 years B.P. Uplift events occur at the same frequency as unusually high tsunamis. Each coastal uplift event, which occurs o...

Excitations of seismic background noises are mostly related to fluid disturbances in the atmosphere, ocean and the solid Earth. Earthquakes have not been considered as a stationary excitation source because they occur intermittently. Here we report that acoustic-coupled Rayleigh waves (at 0.7-2.0 Hz) travelling in the ocean and marine sediments, retrieved by correlating ambient noise on a hydro...