The rupture zone of Cascadia great earthquakes from current deformation and the thermal regime

Abstract

An important but poorly known part of the earthquake hazard at near‐coastal cities of western North America from southern British Columbia to northern California is from great thrust earthquakes on the Cascadia subduction zone. Although there have been no such events in the historical record, there is good geological evidence that they have occurred in the past. The downdip landward limit of the seismogenic or seismic rupture zone on the subduction thrust fault has been estimated for the whole Cascadia margin from (1) the locked zone from dislocation modeling of current deformation data, and (2) the thermal regime, taking the downdip limit of seismic behavior on the fault to be controlled by temperature. The geodetic data include ten leveling lines, tide gauges at six locations along the coast, one high precision gravity line, seven horizontal strain arrays, and a continuously recording Global Positioning System (GPS) network. There is present uplift for most of the coast at a rate of a few millimeters per year, decreasing inland, and shortening across the coastal region at about 0.1 µstrain/yr (i.e., 10 mm/yr over a distance of 100 km). The present interseismic uplift is consistent with the great earthquake coseismic subsidence inferred from buried coastal salt marshes and other paleoseismicity data. The modeled width of the locked zone that is taken to be accumulating elastic strain averages 60 km fully locked, plus 60 km transition (90 km fully locked with no transition gives similar interseismic deformation). It is wider off the Olympic Peninsula of northern Washington and narrower off central Oregon to northern California. This unusually narrow downdip extent compared to many other subduction zones is a consequence of high temperatures associated with the young oceanic plate and the thick blanket of insulating sediments on the incoming crust. The variations in the modeled locked zone from geodetic data correspond well to variations along the margin of downdip temperatures on the fault as estimated from numerical thermal models, taking the maximum temperature for the fully locked seismogenic zone to be 350°C with a transition zone to 450°C. The temperatures on the subduction thrust fault and thus the downdip extent of the seismogenic zone depend on five local subduction parameters: (1) the age of the subducting plate, (2) the plate convergence rate, (3) the thickness of insulating sediments on the incoming crust, (4) the dip angle profile of the fault, and (5) the thermal properties of the overlying material. The landward limit to the seismogenic zone, extending little if at all beneath the coast, limits the ground motion from great subduction earthquakes at the larger Cascadia cities that lie 100–200 km inland. The narrow width also limits the earthquake size but events of magnitude well over 8 are still possible; the maximum depends on the along‐margin length. If the whole Cascadia margin seismogenic zone fails in a single event, empirical fault area versus magnitude relations give earthquakes as large as Mw=9.