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SEISMOLOGY

Unrushed megathrusts

Nature Geoscience volume 14, pages 260–261 (2021)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 19 May 2021

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Corals reveal that part of the plate-boundary fault near Sumatra slipped slowly and quietly for three decades before a large earthquake in 1861. The exceptional duration of this slip event has implications for interpreting deformation to assess seismic hazard.

Subduction-zone megathrusts are large faults at the interface of tectonic plates where one plate slides beneath the other. Megathrusts are notorious for producing the largest earthquakes on Earth, but it was recently discovered that these faults don’t always move in a hurry. Analyses of seismic and geodetic data have revealed diverse slip phenomena, ranging from tens of metres of sudden slip in a single giant (magnitude M > 9) earthquake to swarms of low-magnitude (M < 5) tremors and slow slip events, in which slow, largely steady and aseismic motion continues for weeks to years. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Mallick et al.1 infer a slow slip event on the Sumatra part of the Sunda megathrust that lasted for approximately 32 years, much longer than others found before, and propose a mechanism to explain this event.

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Fig. 1: Coral microatoll killed by emergence due to an earthquake in Sumatra.

Aron Meltzner / Earth Observatory of Singapore

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Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by the Millennium Scientific Initiative (ICM) of the Chilean government through grant NC160025 “Millennium Nucleus CYCLO The Seismic Cycle Along Subduction Zones”, FONDECYT grants 1181479 and 1190258, the ANID PIA Anillo ACT192169. This is a contribution to International Geoscience Programme (IGCP) project 639.

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  1. Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile

    Daniel Melnick

  2. Núcleo de Estudios Transdisciplinarios del Cuaternario del Sur de Chile, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile

    Daniel Melnick

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Correspondence to Daniel Melnick.

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Melnick, D. Unrushed megathrusts. Nat. Geosci. 14, 260–261 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00750-z

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