Earthquake Supercycles Inferred from Sea-Level Changes Recorded in the Corals of West Sumatra
Kerry Sieh,1*
Danny H. Natawidjaja,2
Aron J. Meltzner,1
Chuan-Chou Shen,3
Hai Cheng,4
Kuei-Shu Li,3
Bambang W. Suwargadi,2
John Galetzka,1
Belle Philibosian,1
R. Lawrence Edwards4
Records of relative sea-level change extracted from corals of
the Mentawai islands, Sumatra, imply that this 700-kilometer-long
section of the Sunda megathrust has generated broadly similar
sequences of great earthquakes about every two centuries for
at least the past 700 years. The moment magnitude 8.4 earthquake
of September 2007 represents the first in a series of large
partial failures of the Mentawai section that will probably
be completed within the next several decades.
2 Research Center for Geotechnology, Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Bandung, Indonesia.
3 Department of Geosciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC.
4 Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, 639798 Singapore. E-mail: sieh{at}ntu.edu.sg
