Paleoseismology and Paleogeodesy of the Sumatran Subduction Zone

Large sections of the Sunda megathrust have failed progressively over the past decade in an extraordinary earthquake sequence.

One question of great humanitarian and scientific importance is how the remaining un-ruptured and under-ruptured patches might fail in coming decades. We use annually banded coral microatolls, which preserve precise information about past relative sea levels, to deduce tectonic histories centuries into the past. We propose to continue work above the 2004, 2005, and 2007 rupture patches—from Simeulue to the Mentawai Islands—to resolve lingering questions and write up results supporting the particularly high hazards we infer for the near future.