sical properties of the rocks in this environment," says Moore. "The 3D seismic data allowed us to pick the best sites for drilling and will now allow us to extrapolate the drilling results away from the drill holes. The drilling phase in Nankai is scheduled to last for at least 5 years. We also plan to conduct a seismic experiment next year or the year after in which we put seismic sensors down a drill hole and record surface seismic energy in the vertical array along the borehole. This will give us a much more detailed picture of the rocks around the borehole, especially deeper in the hole where we hole to drill at the end of our drilling project (perhaps as much as 6000 m (20,000 ft) below the seafloor."
"The ultimate goal is to understand what‘s happening at different margins," said Bangs. "The 2004 Indonesian tsunami was a big surprise. It‘s still not clear why that earthquake created such a large tsunami. By understanding places like Nankai, we‘ll have more information and a better approach to looking at other places to determine whether they have potential. And we‘ll be less surprised in the future."
The other co-authors are Asahiko Taira and Shin'ichi Kuramoto at JAMSTEC, Emily Pangborn at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin and Harold Tobin at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Funding for the project was provided by the National Science Foundation, Ocean Drilling Program and Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Technology.
Release by J.B. Bird at the Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin, with additional information by Tara Hicks Johnson, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, University of Hawaii at Manoa
For Interviews contact:
Greg Moore, Professor, Department of Geology and Geophysics, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, University of Hawaii, firstname.lastname@example.org
*Currently at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC)
Paper: Three-Dimensional Splay Fault Geometry and Implications for Tsunami Generation G. F. Moore, N. L. Bangs, A. Taira, S. Kuramoto, E. Pangborn, H. J. TobinScience 16 November 2007: Vol. 318. no. 5853, pp. 1128 — 1131, DOI:10.1126/science.1147195http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/318/5853/1128
For more information, visit: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/318/5853/1128