Duration - 01/09/2006 - 31/08/2007
Funding - UCD President's Research Fellowship to John Walsh
Basic Aims
Displacements of the Earth’s crust along faults result from catastrophic earthquakes.
At plate boundaries large faults move repeatedly during their lifetime and accommodate many earthquakes.
Accounts of historical earthquakes, which in some parts of the world span the last 2000 years, together
with records of prehistoric seismic events over the last hundred thousand years, indicate that earthquakes
are clustered in space and time. Understanding the physical processes that produce this world-wide phenomenon
is of critical importance and strikes at the heart of the question of what controls the triggering of
earthquakes. This project will study the origins of earthquake clustering by analysing and comparing
an exceptionally well preserved record of large prehistoric earthquakes in the Taupo Volcanic Rift,
New Zealand, with numerical and stochastic models of earthquake behaviour.
Contact: John Walsh
Tel: +353 1 716 2169
Email