Abstract

Frequent high seismic activities occur in Taiwan due to fast plate motions. According to the historical records the most destructive earthquakes in Taiwan were caused mainly by inland active faults. The Central Geological Survey (CGS) of Taiwan has published active fault maps in Taiwan since 1998. There are 33 active faults noted in the 2012 active fault map. After the Chi-Chi earthquake, CGS launched a series of projects to investigate the details to better understand each active fault in Taiwan. This article collected this data to develop active fault parameters and referred to certain experiences from Japan and the United States to establish a methodology for earthquake probability assessment via active faults. We consider the active faults in Central Taiwan as a good example to present the earthquake probability assessment process and results. The appropriate "probability model" was used to estimate the conditional probability where M ≥ 6.5 and M ≥ 7.0 earthquakes. Our result shows that the highest earthquake probability for M ≥ 6.5 earthquake occurring in 30, 50, and 100 years in Central Taiwan is the Tachia-Changhua fault system. Conversely, the lowest earthquake probability is the Chelungpu fault. The goal of our research is to calculate the earthquake probability of the 33 active faults in Taiwan. The active fault parameters are important information that can be applied in the following seismic hazard analysis and seismic simulation.

Highlights

  • Introduction1.1 Earthquake Hazards and Active Faults in Taiwan

  • 1.1 Earthquake Hazards and Active Faults in TaiwanTaiwan is located at the boundary between the Philippine Sea Plate to the east and the Eurasian Plate to the west

  • We considered the variability of each fault adopting 0.3 (0.2), 0.5 (0.5), and 0.7 (0.3) in this study as the Brownian Passage Time (BPT) model’s aperiodicity, which were included in our logic tree branches

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Summary

Introduction

1.1 Earthquake Hazards and Active Faults in Taiwan. Taiwan is located at the boundary between the Philippine Sea Plate to the east and the Eurasian Plate to the west. These two plates have a convergence rate of about 80 mm yr-1 in a ~N118E direction (Seno 1977; Angelier 1986; Yu et al 1997). According to historical records the most destructive earthquakes in Taiwan were caused mainly by inland active faults. The Hsinchu-Taichung earthquake in 1935 was attributed to the Shihtan-Tuntzuchiao fault system. These two events resulted in thousands of casualties

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