Drilling and Earthquake Research
California Institute of Technology
Dr. Hiroo Kanamori
Chairperson：
This afternoon Dr. Hiroo Kanamori will be talking about Drilling and Earthquake Research. He is from the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Kanamori is currently Professor at Caltech. Well, Dr. Kanamori is so well known and I don't think I have to introduce him here. Until last year he was Director of Caltech's Seismological Laboratory. Then, he stepped down from the Director's position to return to research, but since we didn't know that he is still listed as Director in this program.
Drilling and Earthquake Research is the title of his speech today. Dr. Kanamori served as a member of the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council of the United States Geological Survey, and is recently involved in the CUBE project in the US - wide-area real-time seismic information network, and he contributed greatly to the founding of this project. Recently in Japan we started studying how to limit, how to minimize the damage caused by earthquakes, and tried to learn about real-time seismology.
Now Dr. Kanamori please.
Dr. Kanamori：
Thank you very much, Dr. Hotta. I'll give this lecture in English.
Unlike many other speakers in this meeting, personally I have never been involved in drilling programs, and I am not part of the US Parkfield drilling project. I am a seismologist and have been working on seismology, and in a sense it's very useful for me to look at this drilling program from outside and then see what the relevance of this kind of big program is to the kind of science I have been doing.
Today I want to focus on a very specific problem about physics of earthquakes along subduction boundaries. Yesterday Dr. Solomon introduced the very importance of drilling projects for understanding dynamics, and he said that subduction zones are the places where many large earthquakes are occurring. So, I want to start with that. Now can I have the first slide? I want to use a few slides in the beginning and later I want to use the overhead projector.
(FIG-1)
Well this is a seismicity map of the world, and as everyone knows, most earthquakes occur along the subduction zones from South America, Alaska, the Aleutians, Kamchatka, the Marianas and Tonga Kermadec.
(FIG-2)
So by looking at this kind of map, certainly all subduction zones seem to behave in the same way as far as producing earthquakes. However, if we look at large great earthquakes, this pattern becomes very different. The greatest earthquake in this century is the 1960 Chilean earthquake here, and the 1964 Alaskan earthquake is the second largest; then the Kamchatka and the Kurile Islands earthquakes follow. These subduction zones produce really great earthquakes. However, along the Marianas, or Tonga-Kermadec, historically there has been no single great earthquake.
