TY - JOUR
T1 - Modern diatom assemblages from Chilean tidal marshes and their application for quantifying deformation during past great earthquakes
AU - Hocking, Emma P.
AU - Garrett, Ed
AU - Cisternas, Marco
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (New Investigator Award NE/K000446/1 to E.H. and E.G.) and FONDECYT (Project No. 1150321 to M.C.). Radiocarbon dating support was provided by the Natural Environment Research Council Radiocarbon Facility (grants 1707.0413 and 1795.0414), and we gratefully acknowledge Steve Moreton for providing the radiocarbon dates. We thank Bill Austin, Sarah Woodroffe and Caroline Taylor-Garrett for help in the field, and thank Ian Shennan for providing helpful comments to improve an earlier draft of this paper. We appreciate the constructive reviews of Robin Edwards and an anonymous reviewer, which greatly improved the original manuscript. This paper is a contribution to IGCP Project 639.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Journal of Quaternary Science Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
PY - 2017/4/1
Y1 - 2017/4/1
N2 - Tidal marsh sediments from south-central Chile provide evidence for multiple great earthquakes. Diatom transfer functions, statistical models of the relationship between species preserved in the sediment and elevation, provide quantitative estimates of coseismic vertical land-level change associated with individual earthquakes. However, in south-central Chile, our ability to quantify land-level change is currently limited by a lack of understanding of the environmental variables controlling the distribution of diatoms, an essential prerequisite for converting variations in fossil diatom assemblages into quantitative estimates of past elevation changes. We present a new modern diatom dataset for the region and explore the implications of the scale of the dataset used in transfer function models on the reconstructions of land-level change. Modern training sets containing samples from a regional scale are superior to sub-regional and local-scale training sets, providing closer estimates for known deformation during the great 1960 Chilean earthquake, a higher proportion of good modern analogues and uncertainty terms up to 42% smaller than previously published reconstructions.
AB - Tidal marsh sediments from south-central Chile provide evidence for multiple great earthquakes. Diatom transfer functions, statistical models of the relationship between species preserved in the sediment and elevation, provide quantitative estimates of coseismic vertical land-level change associated with individual earthquakes. However, in south-central Chile, our ability to quantify land-level change is currently limited by a lack of understanding of the environmental variables controlling the distribution of diatoms, an essential prerequisite for converting variations in fossil diatom assemblages into quantitative estimates of past elevation changes. We present a new modern diatom dataset for the region and explore the implications of the scale of the dataset used in transfer function models on the reconstructions of land-level change. Modern training sets containing samples from a regional scale are superior to sub-regional and local-scale training sets, providing closer estimates for known deformation during the great 1960 Chilean earthquake, a higher proportion of good modern analogues and uncertainty terms up to 42% smaller than previously published reconstructions.
KW - coseismic land-level change
KW - modern training sets
KW - palaeoseismology
KW - relative sea-level change
KW - transfer functions
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85016783047&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1002/jqs.2933
DO - 10.1002/jqs.2933
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85016783047
VL - 32
SP - 396
EP - 415
JO - Journal of Quaternary Science
JF - Journal of Quaternary Science
SN - 0267-8179
IS - 3
ER -