Recurrence and Extent of Great Earthquakes in Southern Alaska During the Late Holocene from an Analysis of the Radiocarbon Record of Land-Level Change and Village Abandonment

Hutchinson, Ian; Crowell, Aron L.

doi:10.1017/s0033822200043198

Cited by 24 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 45 publications

(64 reference statements)

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“…Historical accounts suggest that upper plate faulting during the 1880 earthquake produced a Chirikof Island tsunami, which we infer deposited bed C. Approximately 600 km to the northeast of Chirikof Island, Liberty et al (2013) identified an area of mostly submarine upper plate faults with high rates of 1964196419641964Mahrt, 2006Gilpin, 1995Carver and Plafker, 2008Hutchinson and Crowell, 2007Shennan et al, 2014b 1788 1788…”

Section: Tsunami Recurrencementioning

confidence: 80%

“…On Sitkalidak Island on the southeast coast of Kodiak Island, Mahrt (2006) interpreted two broadly dated sand beds extending 400 m inland as probable tsunami deposits. Hutchinson and Crowell (2007) suggested that six episodes of village abandonment, inferred from archaeological stratigraphy throughout the region, may have been caused by subsidence or tsunamis accompanying great earthquakes. Approximately 250 km west of Chirikof Island, Witter et al (2014) could not find clear evidence of any high tsunamis in the past 3000 yr, despite Russian accounts of severe flooding during the 1788 tsunami.…”

Section: Tsunami Recurrencementioning

confidence: 99%

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Tsunami recurrence in the eastern Alaska-Aleutian arc: A Holocene stratigraphic record from Chirikof Island, Alaska

et al. 2015

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Despite the role of the Alaska-Aleutian megathrust as the source of some of the largest earthquakes and tsunamis, the history of its pre-twentieth century tsunamis is largely unknown west of the rupture zone of the great (magnitude, M 9.2) 1964 earthquake. Stratigraphy in core transects at two boggy lowland sites on Chirikof Island's southwest coast preserves tsunami deposits dating from the postglacial to the twentieth century. In a 500-m-long basin 13-15 m above sea level and 400 m from the sea, 4 of 10 sandy to silty beds in a 3-5-m-thick sequence of freshwater peat were probably deposited by tsunamis. The freshwater peat sequence beneath a gently sloping alluvial fan 2 km to the east, 5-15 m above sea level and 550 m from the sea, contains 20 sandy to silty beds deposited since 3.5 ka; at least 13 were probably deposited by tsunamis. Although most of the sandy beds have consistent thicknesses (over distances of 10-265 m), sharp lower contacts, good sorting, and/or upward fining typical of tsunami deposits, the beds contain abundant freshwater diatoms, very few brackish-water diatoms, and no marine diatoms. Apparently, tsunamis traveling inland over low dunes and boggy lowland entrained largely freshwater diatoms. Abundant fragmented diatoms, and lake species in some sandy beds not found in host peat, were probably transported by tsunamis to elevations of >10 m at the eastern site. Single-aliquot regeneration optically stimulated luminescence dating of the third youngest bed is consistent with its having been deposited by the tsunami recorded at Russian hunting outposts in 1788, and with the second youngest bed being deposited by a tsunami during an upper plate earthquake in 1880. We infer from stratigraphy, 14 C-dated peat deposition rates, and unpublished analyses of the island's history that the 1938 tsunami may locally have reached an elevation of >10 m. As this is the first record of Aleutian tsunamis extending throughout the Holocene, we cannot estimate source earthquake locations or magnitudes for most tsunami-deposited beds. We infer that no more than 3 of the 23 possible tsunamis beds at both sites were deposited following upper plate faulting or submarine landslides independent of megathrust earthquakes. If so, the Semidi segment of the Alaska-Aleutian megathrust near Chirikof Island probably sent high tsunamis southward every 180-270 yr for at least the past 3500 yr.

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Section: Tsunami Recurrencementioning

confidence: 80%

Section: Tsunami Recurrencementioning

confidence: 99%

Tsunami recurrence in the eastern Alaska-Aleutian arc: A Holocene stratigraphic record from Chirikof Island, Alaska

et al. 2015

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“…Shorter and more fragmentary records from the Kenai Peninsula, the Yakataga coast and Kodiak Archipelago raise the hypothesis of different patterns of surface deformation during past great earthquakes and hence differing coseismic slip at the plate boundary Hamilton and Shennan, 2005b;Hutchinson and Crowell, 2007;Kelsey et al, 2015;Shennan et al, 2014a;Shennan et al, 2014c;Shennan et al, 2009).…”

Section: Tectonic Setting and Plate Segmentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other locations record episodes of marsh submergence (Hutchinson and Crowell, 2007) but we exclude them from this analysis as they either show insufficient evidence of lateral continuity of the local stratigraphy, such as the large delta of Fox River (Combellick and Reger, 1994) or their age control relies on radiocarbon dating of bulk peat samples. Initial attempts to correlate possible paleoseismic evidence around Cook Inlet reported significant differences in the ages of peat-mud couplets between sites (Combellick, 1991(Combellick, , 1994Combellick and Reger, 1994).…”

Section: Testing Displacement Predictions For Different Rupture Modesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detection limits of tidal-wetland sequences to identify variable rupture modes of megathrust earthquakes

Shennan

Garrett

Barlow

2016

Quaternary Science Reviews

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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...

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“…Biases resulting from intrasite sampling can, however, be reduced by dividing the summed probability values by the number of contributing ages to produce a mean probability curve for the site. Biases associated with differential site preservation and intersite sampling effort can also be reduced if all the probability curves from an area are aggregated to produce a regional age-activity index (Hutchinson and McMillan, 1997;Hutchinson and Crowell, 2007). The fluctuations in the resultant curve may reveal widespread episodes of site establishment, abandonment or re-occupation.…”

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confidence: 99%

Late-Holocene mega-tsunamis in the Tasman Sea: an assessment of the coastal archaeological record of New South Wales

Hutchinson

Attenbrow

2009

The Holocene

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Bryant and others have interpreted geomorphological and archaeological evidence from southcentral New South Wales (NSW) to infer repeated inundation of this coast by mega-tsunamis in late Holocene time. However, the stratigraphy of two well-dated archaeological sites (Pambula Lake, Bass Point) shows no evidence that these camps were abandoned, or that the marine component of the diet of local Aboriginal peoples changed at or about 500 or 1500 cal. BP, the time of the two most recent inferred mega-tsunamis. In addition, the mean probability distribution of the youngest calibrated radiocarbon ages from 52 archaeological sites on the southcentral NSW coast (grouped in three tsunami-susceptibility classes on the basis of site elevation and distance from the shore) does not differ from random expectations, and shows no evidence that sites were permanently abandoned in the aftermath of these inferred events. The mean probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon ages from 108 charcoal samples from these sites does not differ from random expectations, and offers little support for the inference that the sites were temporarily abandoned about 500 or 1500 cal. BP. Probability distributions based on 70 marine shell ages show strong century-scale cyclicity, but this is likely too regular to be a product of mega-tsunamis. Moreover, changes in shellfish exploitation patterns and adoption of new fishing technologies by Aboriginal people on this coast do not coincide with the times of inferred tsunamis. The archaeological evidence offers no support for the hypothesis that mega-tsunamis inundated this coastline in the late Holocene.

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Recurrence and Extent of Great Earthquakes in Southern Alaska During the Late Holocene from an Analysis of the Radiocarbon Record of Land-Level Change and Village Abandonment

Cited by 24 publications

References 45 publications

Tsunami recurrence in the eastern Alaska-Aleutian arc: A Holocene stratigraphic record from Chirikof Island, Alaska

Tsunami recurrence in the eastern Alaska-Aleutian arc: A Holocene stratigraphic record from Chirikof Island, Alaska

Detection limits of tidal-wetland sequences to identify variable rupture modes of megathrust earthquakes

Late-Holocene mega-tsunamis in the Tasman Sea: an assessment of the coastal archaeological record of New South Wales

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