[iris-bulk] WPGM session on large earthquakes

[IRIS]

Dear Colleagues,

We have proposed the following earthquake session for the upcoming AGU  
Western Pacific Geophysics in Cairns, Australia, 29 July to 1 August.  
This session will be an excellent opportunity to bring together  
scientists from various branches of earthquake science to discuss the  
unusually large number of great earthquakes that have occurred since  
2004. Please consider submitting an abstract to this session.

T03: Recent large earthquakes and tsunamis in Indonesia and the  
western Pacific: Do we know what to expect?
        (http://www.agu.org/meetings/wp08/?content=search&show=detail&sessid=62 
)

Description: The 26 December 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake was the  
first of a series of large earthquakes to have occurred recently in  
the Indonesian archipelago and the western Pacific. In the three years  
following this massive magnitude 9.2 earthquake, 8 additional events  
of magnitude 8 or greater have occurred worldwide, all but one in  
subduction zones of the western Pacific or Sumatra: 3 off Sumatra, 2  
in the Kurile Islands, and one each in Tonga in the Solomon Islands.  
This frequency of magnitude 8+ earthquakes is triple the long-term  
average for earthquake occurrence globally, and, at least in the case  
of Sumatra, the spatial clustering of these events is remarkable.

The occurrence of these recent earthquakes has raised some fundamental  
questions regarding large subduction zone earthquakes: (1) What  
determines the maximum event size that can be expected in a subduction  
zone?; (2) What triggering mechanisms might be responsible for their  
apparent spatial clustering?; (3) What determines their tsunamigenic  
potential?; (4) What techniques can be used in tsunami warning systems  
to rapidly characterise their source properties? Earthquake and  
tsunami scientists studying large subduction zone earthquakes are  
invited to help answer these questions.

Phil R. Cummins
Geoscience Australia

Fred W. Taylor
Institute for Geophysics-Univ. Texas


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