Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. earthquakes. We conclude that coastal paleoseismological studies benefit from a methodological framework that employs rigorous evaluation of five essential criteria and a sixth which may be very robust but only occur at some sites: 1 -lateral extent of peat-mud or mud-peat couplets with sharp contacts; 2 -suddenness of submergence or emergence, and replicated within each site; 3 -amount of vertical motion, quantified with 95% error terms and replicated within each site; 4 -syncroneity of submergence and emergence based on statistical age modelling; 5 -spatial pattern of submergence and emergence; 6 -possible additional evidence, such as evidence of a tsunami or liquefaction concurrent with submergence or emergence. We suggest that it is possible to consider detection limits as low as 0.1 to 0.2 m coseismic vertical change.
Introduction and structure of the paperCoastal paleoseismology provides critical information that helps to improve understanding and modelling of seismic hazards, including associated tsunami, at all major subduction zones. Key contributions to practical earthquake hazard assessment include the identification of great (magnitude 8 or 9) earthquakes during the Holocene where there is no historical record (Atwater, 1987); earthquakes of substantially greater magnitude than directly observed (Minoura et al., 2001;Sawai et al., 2008); estimating recurrence intervals of great earthquakes (Atwater and HemphillHaley, 1997;Nelson et al., 1995); and defining different patterns of rupture along a subduction zone (Cisternas et al., 2005;Kelsey et al., 2002;Nelson et al., 2006;Sawai et al., 2004). Since publication of the seminal paper (Atwater, 1987), and widespread adoption of well-tested field and analytical methods (e.g. Atwater and Hemphill-Haley, 1997;Hayward et al., 2006;Kelsey, 2015;Nelson, 2015;Nelson et al., 1996;Witter, 2015) debate moved on to questions critical for hazard assessment, emergency planning and international building code design (Mueller et al., 2015;Wesson et al., 2007). Key questions include the extent of past great earthquake ruptures (a proxy for magnitude), the identification of the boundaries between rupture segments, the persistence of these boundaries over multiple earthquake cycles, recurrence intervals of great earthquakes in each segment, the role of aseismic slip, and whether segments of plate boundaries that are currently creeping can generate great earthquakes Goldfinger et al., 2012;Hayward et al., 2015;Kelsey et al., 2015;Mueller...
