Appendix I

Volume 1 - Final Report

The study area is situated along the southern edge of the Superstition Mountains approximately 40 miles east of the greater Phoenix metropolitan area (Figure 1). Geology is dominated by mid-Tertiary volcanic rocks of the Superior volcanic field (Ransome, 1903), and these rocks depostionally overlie a crystalline basement of early Proterozoic Pinal Schist intruded by middle Proterozoic granitoids. In some areas a relatively thin sequence of the Middle Proterozoic Apache Group occurs along the contact between these two rock types.

This report presents an assessment of the seismic hazard associated with the Sugarloaf fault, which crosses State Route (SR) 87 near Mesquite Wash in central Arizona. The Sugarloaf fault is a 20 km (12 mile) long, northwest- to north-trending normal fault with displacement down to the east. We conducted a multi-faceted investigation in order to evaluate the late Quaternary behavior of the Sugarloaf fault and assess the seismic hazard associated with it.

This paper is a progress report on the mapping effort for the central and eastern U.S.

We combine geodetic, geologic, and seismic information to estimate frequencies of damaging earthquakes in three types of seismotectonic zones.

Source parameters for historical earthquakes worldwide are compiled to develop a series of empirical relationships among moment magnitude (M), surface rupture length, subsurface rupture length, downdip rupture width, rupture area, and maximum and average displacement per event. The resulting data base is a significant update of previous compilations and includes the additional source parameters of seismic moment, moment magnitude, subsurface rupture length, downdip rupture width, and average surface displacement.

Exposures we have excavated across the San Andreas fault contradict the hypothesis that part of the fault in the Carrizo Plain is unusually strong and experiences relatively infrequent rupture. The exposures record evidence of at least seven surface-rupturing earthquakes which have been approximately dated by accelerated mass spectrometry radiocarbon analysis of detrital charcoal and buried in situ plants.

Two monuments from an 1855 cadastral survey that span the San Andreas fault in the Carrizo Plain have been right-laterally displaced 11.0 ± 2.5 m by the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake and associated seismicity and afterslip. This measurement confirms that at least 9.5 ± 0.5 m of slip occurred along the main fault trace, as suggested by measurements of offset channels near Wallace Creek.

The maximum background earthquake (MBE) is the largest earthquake not associated with significant primary surface rupture. The MBE is estimated for the Basin and Range province considering 22 earthquakes from the province and a simple physical model of a circular rupture in the seismogenic zone.