Landslides in the Sydney Basin - Geoscience Australia

Seismic Hazard in SydneyProceedings of the one day workshopFigure 7 Magnitude versus length data used to correct for the overestimation of rupturelength. Open circles are for reverse, oblique-reverse, and rare strike-slip faults in regions oflow slip rate from the world-wide database of Stirling et al. (2002). Solid diamonds are fromNew Zealand seismological data for earthquakes in regions of low-to-moderate slip rate.Next we provide a basis to calculate a distribution of possible characteristic magnitudes and rupturelengths associated with the SED’s calculated for a fault. We bring more knowledge to bear on theproblem by imposing constraints on allowable rupture lengths and widths. Fault scaling relations arerequired for determining magnitude and rupture length given SED. We have discussed the choice ofsuitable scaling relations for the Sydney Basin in the previous section. The relations fordisplacement-length are given by Equations 8 and 11, while those for displacement-magnitude aregiven by Equations 7 and 10.Rupture lengths derived using Equations 8 and 11 have also been used to constrain allowable SEDvalues in that earthquake rupture lengths are likely to be limited by the maximum fault length for thedip-slip fault zones (see section “New fault data in the Sydney Basin”). In general these zones aretruncated by more dominant NW-SE oriented strike-slip faults. There is some possibility that anenergetic rupture could jump across to a neighbouring zone, a classic example of this being the 1992Landers, California, earthquake (e.g. Johnson et al., 1994). To allow for such an eventuality weallow the maximum rupture length to be equal to the seismogenic thickness (18 km), i.e. to have anaspect ratio of 1:1, in 50% of cases. For the remaining cases, the maximum rupture length is limitedto 10 km — the largest dip-slip fault zone length in the south Sydney Basin (see section “New faultdata in the Sydney Basin”). When the rupture length calculated for a given SED value exceeds theallowable length as defined above, that particular branch of the probability calculations has beendiscarded.Similarly, SED’s associated with very short rupture lengths are also excluded. This is because veryshort ruptures will also have small widths (given that we are assuming 1:1 aspect ratios, suitable fordip-slip faults) and will thus not be capable of generating surface ruptures. Coalfield data show adecrease in total fault offsets towards the surface over depths of ~2 km, implying that surfaceruptures are driven from depths greater than this. Seismicity is also sparse in the top 2 km, so withinthis depth range moderate to large earthquakes are very unlikely to nucleate. A minimum allowablewidth (and length) of 2 km has thus been used to exclude small SED values.