Rupture History Research Articles

A Maximum Rupture Model for the Southern San Andreas and San Jacinto Faults, California, Derived From Paleoseismic Earthquake Ages: Observations and Limitations

AbstractPaleoseismic rupture histories provide spatiotemporal models of earthquake moment release needed to test numerical models and lengthen the instrumental catalog. We develop a model of the fewest and thus largest magnitude earthquakes permitted by paleoseismic data for the last 1,500 years on the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto Faults, California, USA. The largest geometric complexity appears to regulate the system: Only two ruptures break the San Gorgonio Pass region, followed by episodes of ruptures that could bridge the northern San Jacinto Fault and the San Andreas Fault. When tested against independent data on slip per event, the model produces comparable values indicating the end‐member model does not underpredict rupture rates. Rupture of >85% of the fault length in the historic period between 1800 and 1857 and the subsequent quiescence is similar to epochs of activity in the prehistoric model, suggesting that regional clustering of seismicity could be a trait of the system.

Modeling repeated coseismic slip to identify and characterize individual earthquakes from geomorphic offsets on strike-slip faults

Coseismic slip distributions of repeated earthquakes are important data used to forecast magnitude and recurrence characteristics of future earthquakes. Many studies infer coseismic slip of past individual paleoearthquakes from frequency histograms of geomorphic offsets. Such histograms, often expressed as a COPD (cumulative offset probability distribution), commonly show multiple peaks with similar displacements, which are interpreted to be incremental slip associated with successive paleoearthquakes. However, assumptions in linking COPD peaks to individual earthquakes have not been fully explored. Here, we combine statistical modeling with global historical coseismic surface rupture data to evaluate the conditions required for the approach. The results show that only coseismic slip with low variability allow more than one event identification; for example, even low CoVs (coefficient of offset variation) of 0.25 and 0.35 permit identification of only 2 to 3 events. In contrast, the mean CoV value for all historical ruptures is 0.58 to 0.66. Furthermore, interpreting the first COPD peak as a single-event slip distribution could result in artificially low variation and flatter distribution of offset than observed in historical earthquakes. This study cautions that robust COPD interpretation on large strike-slip faults requires low offset variability, a sufficient number of offset measurements, and additional constraints like historical coseismic slip data or paleoseismic event sequence data.

Preliminary Remarks toward a Formal Understanding of Revolution

In this essay, Oleg Aronson proposes to view the protests of 1968 as a continuation of the social revolutionary processes initiated by the French Revolution. The author interprets revolution not as an event of historical rupture but as a process of long duration (in the sense of Fernand Braudel’s longue durée). Signs of such revolution are found beyond the regime of human perception and contemplation, beyond the categories of space and time, in the zone of common sense (sensus communis), which Kant saw in such manifestations as the enthusiasm that joins a universal audience (the public) when it is enchanted by the spectacle of revolution. The article attempts to show how, as mass society develops, the revolution shifts from action to spectacle. However, if we view mass society itself as an effect of the revolutionary process of long duration, then freedom, equality, and fraternity (commonality) turn out to be less values affirmed by revolution than invariants of a common sense, outside of which they are unthinkable and unimaginable. Being unrepresentable, they constantly receive representative equivalents, which constitute the spectacle. The author proposes to use them as social imaginaries (in the sense of imaginary numbers in mathematics), which indicate the dynamics of processes that exceed the framework of individual and historical (albeit still anthropometric) understanding. Such an analysis of revolution as a process, and not as a concrete historical event, allows us to see it less as a transformation of society than as the surmounting of the human order itself, of the world of values that are understood as immutable and whose violation always looks like lawlessness.

The Misrepresentation of Hong Kongness

Established in 1962, the Hong Kong Museum of Art was the first public museum in the city. It closed in August 2015 for a four-year renovation and spatial expansion of the facility, and reopened its doors in November 2019. The renovation happened precisely in the interstices of two important historical ruptures in recent Hong Kong history: the Umbrella Movement of 2014 and the ongoing Anti-China Extradition Movement that started in 2019. These movements are redefining the identity of the city and its people in contrast to the conventional Hong Kong cliché of transformation from fishing village to modern financial hub. Without addressing recent changes in cultural identity, the revamped museum rhetorically deploys obsolete curatorial narratives through exhibitions of Hong Kong art. This report critiques the representation of Hong Kongness in the revamped museum and argues that the latter is a soulless entity that overlooks the fact that both politics and art are now reconstructing local identities.

Patterns of the Seismic Cycle in the Kuril Island Arc from GPS Observations

The 2006–2007 Simushir earthquakes started a new episode in the rupture history of the Kuril-Kamchatka subduction zone. This earthquake doublet terminated the seismic silence in the Central Kurils, which had lasted for almost a century. The analysis of seismologic, geologic and GPS data over the Kuril Islands region allows us to reveal the patterns of deformation of the lithosphere in the Kuril subduction zone, in particular, the peculiarities of accumulation and relaxation of elastic stresses during the seismic cycle. We analyzed > 9 years of continuous GPS observations on the Kuril Islands to determine the surface displacements caused by the geodynamic processes in the subduction zone. We used available GPS data to model the coseismic stress release and postseismic stress relaxation related to the 2006–2007 Simushir earthquakes. We showed that the duration of postseismic relaxation after the 2006 earthquake exceeds 10 years, preventing transition of the central Kurils to the interseismic stage and thus delaying the beginning of the new seismic cycle. The value of Maxwell viscosity of the asthenosphere found in this study (3 × 1017 Pa s) in the Kuril Island arc is substantially lower than the values determined for several other subduction zones. This contrast in viscosity agrees with Kogan et al. (J Geophys Res 118:3691–3706, 2013), who used shorter GPS time series than in our study. The results of our analysis show that multidirectional motions along the Kurils Islands are explained by the fact that segments of the island arc are at different stages of the seismic cycle.

FROM HISTORICAL STRUCTURES TO TEMPORAL LAYERS: HANS FREYER AND CONCEPTUAL HISTORY

ABSTRACTThis article assesses, for the first time, the significance for German conceptual history of the sociologist, philosopher, and conservative political theorist Hans Freyer. Freyer theorized historical structures as products of political activity, emphasized the presence of several historical layers in each moment, and underscored the need to read concepts with regard to accumulated structures. He thus significantly influenced not only German structural history but also conceptual history emerging from it in the work of Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and, most notably, Reinhart Koselleck, whose theories of temporal layers in history and concepts reworked the Freyerian starting points. Underscoring the openness and plurality of history, criticizing its false “plannability,” and reading world history as European history writ large, Freyer shaped the politically oriented theory of history behind Koselleckian Begriffsgeschichte. Further, Freyer theorized the eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century transition to industrial society as a historical rupture or “epochal threshold,” which bears close, and by no means coincidental, similarity to Koselleck's saddle‐time thesis (Sattelzeit). Freyer's theory of history sheds light on the interrelations of many Koselleckian key ideas, including temporal layers, the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous, the plannability of history, and the Sattelzeit.

Satellite imaging of the 2015 M7.2 earthquake in the Central Pamir, Tajikistan, elucidates a sequence of shallow strike-slip ruptures of the Sarez-Karakul fault

SUMMARYOn 7 December 2015, a shallow Mw 7.2 strike-slip earthquake struck the Murghab River Valley in the Central Pamirs of Tajikistan. Seismologically this event was similar to a large seismic event in 1911 whose causative fault has never been identified. We measure the displacement field of the 2015 event from satellite observations using Sentinel-1 radar interferometry, Landsat-8 optical pixel-tracking, and surface rupture mapping from high resolution SPOT-6/7 imagery to characterize the role this earthquake rupture plays in the accommodation of strain on its causative structure, the Sarez-Karakul fault. We present geomorphic mapping and interpretations of other Quaternary-active reaches of this fault system, which highlight variable rupture history of the different sections. These sections appear to be separated by inherited bedrock structural boundaries. Significantly, the reaches of the fault northeast and southwest of the 2015 rupture exhibit the freshest morphology prior to 2015, indicative of a more recent rupture than elsewhere. Using new high resolution imagery we map fresh scarps at the northern and southern ends of the Sarez-Karakul fault which may represent this 1911 rupture. To test which of these reaches could have been the source of the elusive 1911 event, we compare synthetic seismograms from three plausible fault sources determined from geomorphology, with observed seismic traces from 1911 at early recording stations throughout Europe. We find that the best fitting fault source is in fact southwest of the 2015 rupture, meaning that we have a record of three distinct recent events on the Sarez-Karakul fault system—two of them instrumentally recorded. Our mapping of these separate events reveals a correlation between their boundaries and the active and inherited thrust and suture systems that intersect the northeast striking left-lateral fault, suggesting structural control over the extents of individual ruptures on the active strike-slip fault.

The 2018 Mw 6.8 Zakynthos (Ionian Sea, Greece) earthquake: seismic source and local tsunami characterization

SUMMARYWe investigated the kinematic rupture model of the 2018 Mw 6.8 Zakynthos, Ionian Sea (Greece), earthquake by using a non-linear joint inversion of strong motion data, high-rate GPS time-series and static coseismic GPS displacements. We also tested inversion results against tide-gauge recordings of the small tsunami generated in the Ionian Sea. In order to constrain the fault geometry, we performed several preliminary kinematic inversions by assuming the parameter values resulting from different published moment tensor solutions. The lowest cost function values were obtained by using the geometry derived from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) focal solution. Between the two conjugate USGS planes, the rupture model which better fits the data is the one with the N9°E-striking 39°ESE-dipping plane. The rupture history of this model is characterized by a bilateral propagation, featuring two asperities; a main slip patch extending between 14 and 28 km in depth, 9 km northeast from the nucleation and a slightly shallower small patch located 27 km southwest from the nucleation. The maximum energy release occurs between 8 and 12 s, when both patches are breaking simultaneously. The maximum slip is 1.8 m and the total seismic moment is 2.4 × 1019 Nm, corresponding to a Mw value of 6.8. The slip angle shows a dominant right-lateral strike-slip mechanism, with a minor reverse component that increases on the deeper region of the fault. This result, in addition to the observed possibility of similar mechanisms for previous earthquakes occurred in 1959 and 1997, suggests that the tectonic deformation between the Cephalonia Transform Fault Zone and the northern tip of the Hellenic Arc Subduction zone may be accommodated by prevailing right lateral low-dipping faults, occurring on re-activated structures previously experiencing (until Pliocene) compressional regime. Comparison of predicted and observed tsunami data suggests the need of a better characterization of local harbour response for this type of relatively short-wavelength events, which is important in the context of tsunami early warning. However, the suggested dominantly strike-slip character would in turn imply a reduced tsunami hazard as compared to a dominant thrust faulting regime from this source region.

Archaeology, Historical Ruptures, and Ani-Kitu Hwagi Memory and Knowledge

Archaeology, Historical Ruptures, and Ani-Kitu Hwagi Memory and Knowledge

Материя мнимостей (набросок к формальному пониманию революции)

В статье «Материя мнимостей» рассматриваются протесты 1968 г. как про­должение социальных революционных процессов, запущенных Великой французской революцией. Революция интерпретируется автором не как со­бытие исторического разрыва, а как процесс большой длительности (отсы­лающий к проблематике времени longue durée Фернана Броделя). Знаки так понятой революции располагаются уже вне режима человеческого восприя­тия и созерцания, вне категорий времени и пространства, а находятся в зоне «общего чувства» (sensus communis), одно из проявлений которого Кант ви­дел в «энтузиазме», возникающем у всемирной аудитории (публики), заво­роженной зрелищем революции. В статье делается попытка показать, как по мере развития массового общества революция смещается от действия к зрелищу. Однако если рассматривать само массовое общество как эффект революционного процесса большой длительности, то «свобода», «равен­ство», «братство» (общность) оказываются не столько утверждаемыми ре­волюцией ценностями, сколько инвариантами общего чувства, вне которого они немыслимы и непредставимы. Будучи неизобразимыми, они постоянно получают для себя изобразительные эквиваленты, из которых соткано зре­лище. Автор же предлагает обратиться к ним как к социальным мнимостям (наподобие «мнимых чисел» в математике), которые указывают на дина­мику процессов, выходящих за рамки индивидуального и исторического (но по-прежнему человекомерного) понимания. Подобное рассмотрение ре­волюции как процесса, а не конкретного исторического события, позволяет увидеть в ней не столько преобразование общества, сколько преодоление самого человеческого порядка, мира тех ценностей, которые мыслятся как незыблемые и нарушение которых всегда выглядит как беззаконие.

Estimation of the Rupture History of the 2008 Mw8.0 Wenchuan Earthquake by Joint Inversion of Teleseismic and Strong‐Motion Records

In order to reproduce the rupture history of the 2008 Mw8.0 Wenchuan earthquake, the teleseismic and strong‐motion records are adopted. Based on a multiple‐segment, variable‐slip model, the finite fault inversion method is utilized to recover the rupture process. The results are as follows: (1) the rupture duration of the Wenchuan earthquake is about 100 s, and the released seismic moment is 1.24 × 1021 N·m, equal to the moment magnitude Mw8.0. There are 5 asperities on the fault plane, indicating that the earthquake is composed of at least 5 subevents. (2) The slip is mainly distributed on the Beichuan fault, indicating that the Beichuan fault is the main rupture fault. On the southern part of the Beichuan fault, the dislocation underside the Longmenshan area and Hongkou‐Yingxiu near‐surface area is dominated by thrust, and the maximum slip is 11.8 m. Slip between the Yuejiashan and Qingping area is dominated by thrust. On the northern part of the Beichuan fault, the area under Beichuan is dominated by thrust, the slip under Nanba is thrust and strike, near Qingchuan, the slip turns into the strike slip, and the maximum slip is 13.1 m. The dislocation under Bailu is also dominated by thrust, with maximum slip 8.9 m. (3) The rupture of the Wenchuan earthquake is mainly a unilateral rupture to the northeast. The rupture started at the low dip angle part of the Beichuan fault, and after 3 s, it propagated to the Pengguan fault. After 10 s, the largest asperity under Longmenshan in the south section of the Beichuan fault began to break, lasting for about 24 s. Then, the Xiaoyudong fault was triggered by the Pengguan fault, and the bilateral rupture of the high dip angle part of the Beichuan fault started at about 6 s. South section of the Beichuan fault began to break at about 35 s, and at 43 s, 63 s, and 80 s, the rupture extended to Beichuan, Nanba, and Qingchuan areas.

Durable Violence in Southeast Asia: Machinery and Scale

Rampant forms of violence increasingly take place not only in troubled areas but also in centers and metropoles. Such violence is no longer simply confined to local concerns or historical ruptures, but emerges instead in relation to modalities of power. The movement of people and expanding networks of actors and capital enables the notion of violence to transgress boundaries set by institutions, geography, state, and power. In some conditions, rather than sealing off the emergence of violence, the transition to democracy has opened the door for engineered violent confrontations to manifest out of cleavages that have been tempered by previous authoritarian rule. ASEAS 12(2) addresses violence in selected cases and on different scales. The contributions discuss how violence is practiced, how it (re)produces structures, and how it may eventually transform into non-violence. Violence is not simply an outcome of tensions but is a mechanism that actors and organizations deploy to stabilize their struggles, which eventually makes peacebuilding or democratic projects volatile. The articles in this issue feature police violence in the Philippines; intimate partner violence against women in Vietnam; Islamist online/offline mobilization strategies in Indonesia; the role of traditional actors in reconciliation processes in Timor-Leste; and gender security in the context of conflict management in Thailand’s Deep South.

Frenchmen Into Peasants Into Frenchmen: Revolutionary Past and Future in George Sand’s Nanon

ABSTRACTPublished following the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, George Sand's 1872 novel Nanon is written as the 1850 memoirs of a peasant woman who had lived through the French Revolution. Focusing on the temporal shifts of the novel, I argue that by considering the temporalities of Nanon in conjunction with spatial movements, we can see Sand's refusal to think about the Revolution as a rupture in history. In the novel, the Frenchmen of the urban revolution are substituted with peasants who can reach back into the Celtic origins of France and construct a more peaceful French society.

Constitutional Resilience Between Rupture of History and Continuity of Resistance

Abstract The overture of the paper provides a brief survey of the philosophical positions (from Aristotle to the contemporary debate) focusing the conjecture of the legal and constitutional continuum as a problematic presupposition of theories of constituent power. The positions of the authors that we can call as continuist authors (up to Kelsen and the neo-normativism, including Soviet jurists and theorists of the constitutional cycles) constitutes the dominant part of the theoretical evolution. We discuss it (respectfully) even if we openly criticize it, with a peculiar debate involving that other position called as discontinuist (whose authors are especially Marxists philosophers, anti-fascist intellectuals like Piero Gobetti, and their references in philosophy such as Leibniz and Vico). In the first movement of the paper, we reconstruct the equivoque at the basis of the conjecture of the continuum. It corresponds to a «three-time» scheme of constitutional dynamics: (revolutionary) rupture – transition – constitution. This structure makes useless (conceptually unusable, and perhaps sources of logical contradictions) both rupture and transition. The second and final movement underlines the theoretical demand to consider the transition and the constitution as coextensive domains. Transition is, in other words, already Constitution, and the constitution is always a transition. To the latter ones, we introduce and add another phenomenon characterizing the historical phase of the transition, namely the Resistance. The fact of resistance escapes the constitutionalisation, and imposes upon the latter a necessary character of transition.

Holocene earthquake history and slip rate of the southern Teton fault, Wyoming, USA

AbstractThe 72-km-long Teton normal fault bounds the eastern base of the Teton Range in northwestern Wyoming, USA. Although geomorphic surfaces along the fault record latest Pleistocene to Holocene fault movement, the postglacial earthquake history of the fault has remained enigmatic. We excavated a paleoseismic trench at the Buffalo Bowl site along the southernmost part of the fault to determine its Holocene rupture history and slip rate. At the site, ∼6.3 m of displacement postdates an early Holocene (ca. 10.5 ka) alluvial-fan surface. We document evidence of three surface-faulting earthquakes based on packages of scarp-derived colluvium that postdate the alluvial-fan units. Bayesian modeling of radiocarbon and luminescence ages yields earthquake times of ca. 9.9 ka, ca. 7.1 ka, and ca. 4.6 ka, forming the longest, most complete paleoseismic record of the Teton fault. We integrate these data with a displaced deglacial surface 4 km NE at Granite Canyon to calculate a postglacial to mid-Holocene (14.4–4.6 ka) slip rate of ∼1.1 mm/yr. Our analysis also suggests that the postglacial to early Holocene (14.4–9.9 ka) slip rate exceeds the Holocene (9.9–4.6 ka) rate by a factor of ∼2 (maximum of 3); however, a uniform rate for the fault is possible considering the 95% slip-rate errors. The ∼5 k.y. elapsed time since the last rupture of the southernmost Teton fault implies a current slip deficit of ∼4–5 m, which is possibly explained by spatially/temporally incomplete paleoseismic data, irregular earthquake recurrence, and/or variable per-event displacement. Our study emphasizes the importance of minimizing slip-rate uncertainties by integrating paleoseismic and geomorphic data sets and capturing multiple earthquake cycles.

Holocene Rupture History of the Central Teton Fault at Leigh Lake, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

ABSTRACT Prominent scarps on Pinedale glacial surfaces along the eastern base of the Teton Range confirm latest Pleistocene to Holocene surface-faulting earthquakes on the Teton fault, but the timing of these events is only broadly constrained by a single previous paleoseismic study. We excavated two trenches at the Leigh Lake site near the center of the Teton fault to address open questions about earthquake timing and rupture length. Structural and stratigraphic evidence indicates two surface-faulting earthquakes at the site that postdate deglacial sediments dated by radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence to ∼10–11 ka. Earthquake LL2 occurred at ∼10.0 ka (9.7–10.4 ka; 95% confidence range) and LL1 at ∼5.9 ka (4.8–7.1 ka; 95%). LL2 predates an earthquake at ∼8 ka identified in the previous paleoseismic investigation at Granite Canyon. LL1 corresponds to the most recent Granite Canyon earthquake at ∼4.7–7.9 ka (95% confidence range). Our results are consistent with the previously documented long-elapsed time since the most recent Teton fault rupture and expand the fault’s earthquake history into the early Holocene.

Secular Lyric: The Modernization of the Poem in Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson

Secular Lyric: The Modernization of the Poem in Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson

Can there be another Vikalp? Documentary film, censorship histories, and film festival publics in India

ABSTRACTThe Vikalp Film Festival of 2004 (Vikalp, meaning ‘alternative’ in Hindi) has been celebrated as a seminal event in Indian documentary history, an unprecedented, collective mobilization against censorship that also marked a distinct historical rupture in documentary film history in postcolonial India. In this article, I build on recent accounts of the festival by participants and scholars to explore (a) the nature of the interventions that ‘Vikalp’ sought to stage in the history of cinema censorship and (b) the shifts in political documentary film-making that it engendered vis-à vis histories of grassroots political activism in India, as well as emerging networked social movements globally. While Vikalp did not ultimately succeed in changing the colonial-era censorship regulations that continue to govern film exhibition in India, I argue that it changed the terms on which censorship debates had played out by reimagining the role that documentary film could play in protests. Enacting a shift from viewing individual films as ‘tools’ in political struggle, Vikalp focused on the affective encounter between documentary narratives and diverse new audiences in the new millennium. The documentary film screenings and festivals that Vikalp helped mobilize became one node for a documentary ‘counter public’ that called on a reimagining of the form and aesthetics of political documentary film-making, as well as new relationships between artistic practice and activism that continue to circulate across material and physical spaces of film production and circulation in contemporary India.

Riffing the Canon: The Pictures Generation and Racial Bias

Abstract This article considers exhibitions as archival documents, and conceives of the restaging of exhibitions as an act of appropriating the archive. It examines The Pictures Generation 1974–1984 (2009), curated by Douglas Eklund as a restaged 'riff' on Pictures (1977), curated by Douglas Crimp. Pictures was a focused meditation on the historical significance of a particular aesthetic strategy. The Pictures Generation historicized Pictures as the foundational moment of appropriation. Eklund's form of restaging, however, reinforced the racially segregated realities that have marginalized the history of appropriative practices by artists of colour. Drawing on a post+colonial framework, I consider how exhibition restagings may be leveraged as a curatorial strategy of historical rupture.

The 1596 Keicho Earthquake, a 5‐Day, 300‐km‐Long Sequential Rupture Event in the Median Tectonic Line Fault Zone, Southwestern Japan

AbstractHistorical accounts and geological surveys suggest that a sequential rupture event occurred in 1596 CE in the Median Tectonic Line fault zone (MTLFZ) in southwestern Japan. During this event, known as the 1596 Keicho earthquake, the rupture probably propagated in two or three sequential stages, similar to a series of events that occurred along the North Anatolian fault during 1939–1999. The detailed rupture process of the 1596 earthquake event is unknown, however, because coseismic seismological, geological, and geodetic observation data are not available. To reconstruct the rupture processes, we integrated data from Coulomb stress change analyses, fault geometrical analyses, historical accounts, and rupture history. The results suggest that the rupture initiated on the Kawakami fault on 1 September 1596 and propagated bilaterally, to the Beppu Bay fault system, which ruptured on 4 September, and to the MTLFZ in eastern Shikoku and the Rokko‐Awaji fault zone and Arima‐Takatsuki Tectonic Line in the Kinki area, which ruptured on 5 September. However, there is a small possibility that the rupture initiated at the western end of the MTLFZ and propagated eastward unilaterally. The propagation of ruptures might be sensitively controlled not only by stress perturbation and fault geometry but also by rupture history. Evaluation of fault rupture behavior from various viewpoints can contribute to the mitigation of future seismic disasters in fault zones where detailed coseismic observation data from the past are lacking.