Earthquakes and coastal deformation in subduction zones at continental scale (TANTA)

Subduction zones, where oceanic and continental plates meet, have the strongest earthquakes with the highest number of victims and greatest economic losses. The mechanisms that control these earthquakes, as well as their persistence over several millennia, remain poorly understood. Despite recent advances in understanding these mechanisms, the observed time interval of earthquake-induced changes in the land surface is based primarily on decades-long measurements of the Earth's surface. However, given the long intervals of large earthquakes, these time periods are too short to determine the behavior of earthquake cycles. Around the Pacific Rim, TANTA studies the segmentation of subduction zones and the mechanisms that control permanent deformation over millennia. Deformation rates from marine terraces, analyses of GPS time series, and a compilation of data from paleoseismic and geophysical studies are combined. Data mining techniques are used to find correlations between deformation and parameters of different subduction zones.