Date: January 8-9, 2007

Location: USC (SCEC offices and Davidson Conference Center)

Convener: Ken Hudnut, USGS

Registration Deadline: December 11, 2006

Download the Agenda: Word document (56 KB), or PDF (132 KB)

Presentations now available online!

Digging deep into the San Andreas fault, because the past may be the key to the future. SoSAFE will reveal the dates and other crucial aspects of pre-instrumental and pre-historic earthquakes.

The newly formed SCEC Southern San Andreas Fault Evaluation (SoSAFE) Project will increase our knowledge of slip rates, paleo-event chronology, and slip distributions of past earthquakes, for the past two thousand years on the southern San Andreas fault system. From Parkfield to Bombay Beach, and including the San Jacinto fault, the objective is to obtain new data to clarify and refine relative hazard assessments for each potential source of a future 'Big One.' The SoSAFE Project therefore will address specifically the SCEC3 "A1" Science Priority Objective.

As SoSAFE will focus on the southern San Andreas fault, it is appropriate to hold the first workshop as a scientific commemoration of the great 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake, so on January 9th at 8:24 a.m. (PST) we will mark its sesquicentennial.

In the 1857 earthquake, the San Andreas fault ruptured along-strike for at least 360 km with slip of over 9 meters in some places (Sieh, 1978). This event was southern California's historical Big One, estimated at Mw7.8, approximately equivalent in measure to northern California's 1906 Big One with its calamitous societal impact. Over the past year, the 1906 event was commemorated through a wide range of activities and conferences. In the upcoming year, the 1857 event will also be commemorated, in part by this workshop and also in part by enactment of a large-scale 'ShakeOut' disaster planning exercise that will include a simulated Big One on the San Andreas fault. The SoSAFE Project has recently helped to define that Mw7.8 scenario earthquake on the basis of geological inputs (e.g., Weldon et al., 2005; and references therein), and through coordination with the dynamic and kinematic rupture modeling community.

We encourage interested members of the SCEC community to attend, especially those scientists who have submitted SoSAFE proposals, and also those who intend to collaborate with and contribute to the SoSAFE Project using other sources of support.

References:

Sieh, K.E. (1978). Slip Along the San Andreas Fault Associated with the Great 1857 Earthquake, BSSA, 68, No. 5., pp. 1421-1448.

Weldon, R. J., T. E. Fumal, G. P. Biasi, and K. M. Scharer (2005). Past and future earthquakes on the San Andreas fault, Science, 308, pp. 966-967.

Presentations from the Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 2008, workshop are available online!

Watch the SoSAFE video on YouTube!