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Seismicity and Tectonics of Stable Continental Interiors

Perhaps the least understood seismicity and tectonic deformation is that in stable continental interiors far removed from active plate boundaries. Areas of interest include central and eastern North America, northern Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia. New understandings of intraplate tectonic activity and corresponding seismicity have been made through a variety of approaches such as increased completeness of earthquake catalogs from local or national-scale monitoring efforts like USARRAY, from new methods of identifying smaller earthquakes from existing data, through analyses of data sets that image subsurface faults, through studies that constrain historical slip on such faults, from examinations of geodetic, geomorphologic and elevation changes, and through improved measurements of local stresses. Complementing these approaches are studies that show that the lower attenuation of ground motions and strong site responses in continental interior regions result in earthquakes having greater impacts than those at plate boundaries. 

This session seeks diverse contributions related to intraplate earthquake hazards with goals of describing seismicity, characterizing active faults and/or deformation in stable continental interiors, learning the long-term earthquake histories, assessing potential ground motion impacts, applying lessons learned from induced earthquakes, and understanding the mechanisms that cause enigmatic intraplate earthquakes.

Conveners
Anjana K. Shah, U.S. Geological Survey (ashah@usgs.gov); Christine Powell, University of Memphis (capowell@memphis.edu); Will Levandowski, TetraTech (will.levandowski@tetratech.com); Martin Chapman, Virginia Tech (mcc@vt.edu); Maurice Lamontagne, Geological Survey of Canada (maurice.lamontagne@canada.ca)

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