Eine 220-kyr lange kontinuierliche Erdbebenchronik

Our knowledge about and the estimation of the hazard potential of strong earthquakes is very limited, as there are only comparable short data sets from historical records (going back several hundred years), while more complete data sets from instrumental measurements cover even shorter periods of time (<100 years). In order to understand how tectonic fracture zones along which earthquakes occur, behave on longer time scales, and whether potentially destructive large earthquakes occur cyclically, in so-called supercycles, or periodically accumulated, or even randomly, one can only use geological archives to determine which be explored and answered several 10,000 years back. The research discipline of "subaquatic paleoseismology" researches continuous, temporally high-resolution sediment sequences in the ocean and in lakes, which contain sediment rearrangements or sediment deformations caused by earthquakes as "earthquake events". This FWF research project "DeadSeaQuakeRec" explores the sediment archive of the Dead Sea for traces of past earthquakes. The 457 m-long sediment sequence was drilled from the Dead Sea center under a water depth of 300 m through the International Continental Deep Drilling Program (ICDP) during 2010-2011. The sequence comprises a high-resolution, very well dated archive from the past 220,000 years. The recent earthquake history and earthquake processes along the transform faults, the conservative plate boundaries between the African and Arabian plates, are already relatively well known based on other geological studies. This will allow the paleoseismology to be worked out and to be quantitatively calibrated using the drilling in the Dead Sea, in order to reconstruct and test magnitudes and recurrence rates and frequency cycles of strong earthquakes over the entire investigation period of the last 220,000 years. Thus, the Dead Sea and this FWF-DeadSeaQuakeRec project offer the unique opportunity to study long-term earthquake cycles at a conservative plate boundary in detail, and will thus make an important contribution to understand earthquake processes and to improve the assessment of the earthquake risk at such plate boundaries. 1