“…It straddles the transition from subduction of the Pacific Plate at the Hikurangi Trough beneath the North Island, to the strike‐slip dominated Marlborough Fault System in the northeastern South Island. Moreover, paleomagnetic and geodetic data show that the forearc of the Hikurangi subduction margin in the North Island rotates rapidly (∼3–4°/Myr, clockwise) [ Walcott , 1984; Wright and Walcott , 1986; Lamb , 1988; Thornley , 1996; Wallace et al , 2004; Rowan et al , 2005; Nicol et al , 2007], while tectonic blocks in the strike‐slip portion of the plate boundary in the South Island undergo negligible vertical‐axis rotation relative to the bounding Pacific Plate [ Roberts , 1992; Little and Roberts , 1997; Wallace et al , 2007]. Although there is detailed knowledge of active faulting within the onshore plate boundary in the North and South Island (New Zealand Active Fault database: http://data.gns.cri.nz/af/; M. Stirling et al, National Seismic Hazard Model for New Zealand: 2010 update, submitted to Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America , 2012), until recently very little was known about how (and if) active faults in the North Island linked up to those in the South Island [ Carter et al , 1988].…”