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Dating large infrequent earthquakes by damaged cave deposits

¹ Institute of Earth Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel, and Geological Survey of Israel, 30 Malkhe Israel Street, Jerusalem 95501, Israel
² Institute of Earth Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel
³ Geological Survey of Israel, 30 Malkhe Israel Street, Jerusalem 95501, Israel

The long-term recurrence patterns of past earthquakes are of considerable consequence for hazard assessments, and have implications for earthquake physics. We introduce a rigorously dated record of earthquakes from an extensive number of well-preserved preseismic and postseismic precipitates from caves located off the Dead Sea transform. We dated events directly at the paleoseismic contact by means of a novel correlation method with the oxygen isotope record of the speleothems recovered in one of the caves. Within the 185 k.y. covered, we dated 38 seismite samples. These stem from 13–18 earthquakes with a mean recurrence interval of 10–14 k.y. We show that the deformational events dated in the study caves complement independent near-fault paleoseismic records by temporal correlation with the earthquakes recorded therein. This opens up a significant new avenue of earthquake research that will provide precise dating and observational constraints on large infrequent earthquakes.

Key Words: earthquakes • U-Th dating • speleothems • wiggle matching • paleoseismicity • Dead Sea transform

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