Duration - 01/10/2006 - 30/09/2010
PhD student - Marc Giba
Funding - PhD funded by a UCD Ad Astra Scholarship, with additional support from GNS Science, Wellington, New Zealand.
Research Partners
Project description
Normal faults are widespread within the Taranaki Basin, which is up to 100 km west of the North Island of New Zealand. These normal faults principally accrued displacement during the last 10-15 Myr and formed a regional graben thought to reflect backarc extension driven by subduction of the Pacific Plate. Late Tertiary normal faults may reactivate pre-existing early Tertiary and Cretaceous normal faults. In southern parts of the basin the larger faults remain active today while to the north faults appear to be inactive or moving relatively slowly. The available data suggest that fault activity may have migrated both along and across the graben on million-year timescales. The extent to which such migration occurs and, the geological processes producing temporal changes in fault slip rates, remain important unresolved questions. Using seismic, outcrop and earthquake constraints this project will investigate the origin and nature of migrations in fault activity within an active extensional basin.