Earthquake Archive in the GEological Record of the Japan Trench (EAGER-Japan)

Austrian Science Fund (FWF) - (2016-2021)
Project number P29678-N28

PI Michael Strasser 
Project members: Arata Kioka, Pauline Cornard (Postdocs) & Tobias Schwestermann (PhD Student)

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Our perspective of earthquake maximum magnitude and recurrence is limited by short historical and even shorter instrumental records, which are inadequate to fully characterize Earth’s complex and multi-scale seismic behavior. Motivated by the mission to fill the gap in knowledge about the long-term history of great earthquakes, we investigate the traces, which major earthquakes leave behind on the ocean floor to calibrate the marine sediment record for studying past earthquake in geological archives. As documented after the devastating Magnitude 9 Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011, continuous records of comparable past natural impacts are preserved in the geological archive as characteristic event deposits formed by soft marine sediments remobilized by turbidity currents, that were induced due to instabilities of the ocean floor upon strong earthquake shaking.

The EAGER-Japan projects aims at characterizing and precise dating of such extreme event deposits from the marine geological record of the Japan Trench by applying novel analytical techniques applied on samples recovered from the deep sea during sea-going research expeditions. In particular, we aim at identifying the source and transport dynamics of materials remobilized during past extreme events by analyzing composition and texture of individual sand grains, and to measure radioactive decay of individual organic compounds to constrain the timing when such remobilization occurred in the past. The results of these analyses will reveal a dense spatio-temporal data set elucidating when and where strong earthquake shaking has impacted the ocean floor offshore NE Japan in the past. While contributing to unravel a potentially fascinating earthquake history for Japan beyond any current knowledge from historical archive, anticipated conceptual advances in our understanding of causes and consequences of earthquakes and related geological processes in offshore environments are expected to be transformative to other regions worldwide, and may even open up new perspectives for deciphering the rock-record from outcrops on land.  

 

Project collaborators: 
Jasper Moernaut (University of Innsbruck) 
Achim Kopf  (MARUM, University of Bremen) 
Toshiya Kanamatsu (Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology - JAMSTEC)
Shuichi Kodaria (Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology - JAMSTEC)
 Ken Ikehara (Geological Survey of Japan)
Tim Eglinton (ETH Zürich)
Cecilia McHugh (Queens College, New York)

Master-students associated to the EAGER Japan Project:
Jana Molenaar, Dominik Jeager, Jonas Keller,

 

Publications:

• Bao, R., Strasser, M., McNichol, A.P., Haghipour, N., McIntyre, C., Wefer, G., Englinton, T.I. (2018) Tectonically-triggered sediment and carbon export to the Hadal zone. Nature Communications 9, 121, doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-02504- online article
  
•  Kioka, A., Schwestermann, T., Moernaut, J., Ikehara, K., Kanamatsu, T., Eglinton, T.I. & Strasser, M. (2019). Event Stratigraphy in a Hadal Oceanic Trench: The Japan Trench as Sedimentary Archive Recording Recurrent Giant Subduction Zone Earthquakes and Their Role in Organic Carbon Export to the Deep Sea. Frontiers in Earth Science, https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2019.00319
  
• Kioka, A., Schwestermann, T., Moernaut, J., Ikehara, K., Kanamatsu, T., McHugh, C.M., dos Santos Ferreira, C., Wiemer, G., Haghipour, N., Kopf, A.J., Eglinton, T.I., Strasser, M. (2019) Megathrust earthquake drives drastic organic carbon supply to the hadal trench. Nature Scientific Reports, 9, 1553. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-38834-x
• Jaeger, D., Stalder, R., Masago, H., & Strasser, M. (2019). OH defects in quartz as a provenance tool: Application to fluvial and deep marine sediments from SW Japan. Sedimentary Geology, 388, 66–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sedgeo.2019.05.003 online article
• Lackey, J., Moore , G., Strasser, M. (2018) Three-dimensional mapping and kinematic characterization of mass transport deposits along the outer Kumano Basin and Nankai accretionary wedge, southwest Japan. Progress in Earth and Planetary Science, 5:65, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40645-018-0223-4
• Lackey, K., Moore, G. F., Strasser, M., Kopf, A., Ferreira, C.S. (2018) Spatial and temporal cross-cutting relationships between fault structures and slope failures along the outer Kumano Basin and Nankai accretionary wedge, SW Japan. Geological Society of London, Special Publications, 477,  https://doi.org/10.1144/SP477.10
• Molenaar, A., Moernaut, J., Wiemer, G., Dubois, N., & Strasser, M. (2019). Earthquake Impact on Active Margins: Tracing Surficial Remobilization and Seismic Strengthening in a Slope Sedimentary Sequence. Geophysical Research Letters, 41(11), 1195. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL082350
• Schwestermann, T., Huang, J., Konzett, J., Kioka, A., Wefer, G., Ikehara, K., Moernaut, J., Eglinton, T., Strasser, M. (2020). Multivariate statistical and multi‐proxy constraints on earthquake‐triggered sediment remobilization processes in the central Japan Trench. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GC008861
  

• Schwestermann, Tobias; Eglinton, Tim, I.; Haghipour, Negar; McNichol, Ann, P.; Ikehara, Ken; Strasser, Michael (2021); Event-dominate transport, provenance and burial of organic carbon in the Japan Trench. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 563, 116870, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2021.116870

• Strasser, M., Ikehara, K., and Cotterill, C., 2019. Expedition 386 Scientific Prospectus: Japan Trench Paleoseismology. International Ocean Discovery Program. https://doi.org/​10.14379/​iodp.sp.386.2019
  
• Strasser, M. et al. Report and preliminary results of R/V SONNE cruise SO251, Extreme events Archived in the GEological Record of Japan’s Subduction margins (EAGER-Japan), Leg A SO251-1, Yokohama - Yokohama, 04.10.2016 – 15.10.2016, Leg B SO251- 2, Yokohama - Yokohama, 18.10.2016 – 02.11.2016. Berichte, MARUM – Zentrum für Marine Umweltwissenschaften, Fachbereich Geowissenschaften, Universität Bremen, 318, 1–217, http://publications.marum.de/id/eprint/3677 (2017)

 Presentations and Webinars:

Seds Online Webinar 21.10.2020 by Michael Strasser 

Youtube Link