This special issue of Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (NHESS) contains 16 papers that resulted from the European Science Foundation (ESF) Research Conference “Submarine Paleoseismology: The Offshore Search of Large Holocene Earthquakes” that was held at the Universitätszentrum Obergurgl (Austria), from 11 to 16 September 2010 (Pantosti et al., 2011). The conference enabled scientists ...

Many of the largest earthquakes are generated at subduction zones or other plate boundary fault systems near enough to the coast that marine environments may record evidence of them. During and shortly after large earthquakes in the coastal and marine environments, a spectrum of evidence may be left behind, mirroring onshore paleoseismic evidence. Shaking or displacement of the seafloor can tri...

Fault slip distributions provide important insight into the earthquake process. We analyze high-resolution along-strike co-seismic slip profiles of the 1992 Mw = 7.3 Landers and 1999 Mw = 7.1 Hector Mine earthquakes, finding a spatial correlation between fluctuations of the slip distribution and geometrical fault structure. Using a spectral analysis, we demonstrate that the observed variation o...