SSA2023 Session: Crustal Deformation & Seismic Hazard in Cascadia, Canada, and Alaska

[Hobbs, Tiegan]

Happy New Year to all! We invite you to submit your work to the 'Crustal Deformation and Seismic Hazard in Cascadia, Western Canada and Alaska' session of the Seismological Society of America Annual Meeting 2023 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The abstract submission deadline is January 11 2023. The session abstract is below.

Kindly,

Tiegan Hobbs, Richard Styron, Christine Regalla, and Lydia Staisch

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It is well known that a component of plate boundary deformation is distributed along fault sources located 10s to 100s of km away from the plate interface. However, in many systems the locations, geometries, kinematics and rates of deformation along these faults, and how they interact with the plate interface, are poorly understood. This information is necessary both to understand how plate boundary strain is accommodated across the system and to evaluate the seismic hazard these fault sources pose. This is particularly true of the Cascadian upper plate, Canadian Cordillera and Alaskan margins of western North America, where dense vegetation, rugged terrain, limited instrumentation and locally slow strain rates make assessing fault rupture potential challenging. Over the past decade, there has been significant advances in understanding the deformational and paleoseismic histories of fault structures in Oregon, Washington, Vancouver Island, eastern British Columbia and southeastern Alaska. Much of the most recent work builds upon several decades of prior research — but not all of this work is published or publicly available to researchers and hazard modelers. For this reason, we aim to develop a session to bring researchers together to discuss known and suspected crustal faults in this complex plate boundary zone. In this session, we hope to discuss the current state of knowledge of known or suspected active faults using data sets including but not limited to paleoseismology, seismology, geodesy and modeling of shallow faults in northwestern North America. We aim to bring researchers together to not only share knowledge, but also to help build a community of practice, developing ideas and workflows that can be applied to quantify the deformation rates and hazard of crustal fault in similar tectonic and climatic settings.