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Earthquakes

Imperfect dominoes

Within just three years, a 2,000-km stretch of the plate boundary tracing the Indonesian archipelago slipped in four earthquakes. Studies of past and present seismic activity in the region show a complex, but organized pattern of earthquake supercycles, the latest of which has not been completed.

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Figure 1: Failing megathrust.

Inset: KERRY SIEH

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Bürgmann, R. Imperfect dominoes. Nature Geosci 2, 87–88 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo422

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