Quantifying the Long-term Prehistoric Earthquake Record: Advances and Applications
The field of earthquake geology has evolved significantly over recent decades. New technologies such as lidar and other remote-sensing techniques have allowed mapping and characterization of active faults and historical surface ruptures in unprecedented detail. Improved dating and statistical modeling techniques have resulted in more precise dating and correlation of earthquakes to explore complexities such as determining multi-fault ruptures and untangling subduction and crustal fault earthquakes. On-fault studies are complemented by off-fault studies om topics such as turbidites, coastal vertical land movements, landslides, fragile geologic features and archaeoseismology. Together these all provide important constraints on identifying and characterizing active faults in both intraplate and interplate environments, earthquake occurrence statistics, physics-based fault modeling and seismic hazard analysis and physics-based fault models.
BSSA invites contributions to a special issue that reflects upon these developments, highlights current state-of-the-art studies and techniques, and considers future challenges and opportunities in the field of quantitative earthquake geology and related disciplines to understand and model the long-term earthquake record on a fault or fault system.
Topics for this call for papers include, but are not restricted to, the following topics:
- Earthquake geology
- Paleoseismology, including fault trenching, coastal vertical land movements, landslide, tsunami, lake studies
- Archaeoseismology
- Fragile geologic features
- Modern dating techniques and modeling
- New methods for detecting hidden fault sources
- Applications, e.g., multidisciplinary source modeling, seismic hazard analysis, physics-based simulation modeling
Guest Editors for this Special Issue:
- Rich Briggs, United States Geological Survey (rbriggs@usgs.gov)
- Alex Hatem, United States Geological Survey (ahatem@usgs.gov)
- Yann Klinger, Université Paris Cité, Institut de physique du globe de Paris, CNRS (klinger@ipgp.fr)
- Nicola Litchfield, Earth Sciences New Zealand (n.litchfield@gns.cri.nz)
- Dee Ninis, Seismology Research Centre (dee.ninis@src.com.au)
- Mark Stirling, University of Otago (mark.stirling@otago.ac.nz)
Deadline for Submission: 1 June 2026
Articles accepted to this BSSA Special Issue will be published online soon after acceptance and collectively in print in the June 2027 issue. Papers will be reviewed as they are received and published online prior to the print issue.
In preparing manuscripts, authors must follow the BSSA author guidelines at https://www.seismosoc.org/publications/bssa-submission-guidelines.
Papers must be submitted via the BSSA online submission system (www.editorialmanager.com/bssa) under the category “Quantifying the Long-Term Prehistoric Earthquake Record.”
Please address questions about scientific issues to the guest editors or BSSA Editor-in-Chief P. Martin Mai at bssaeditor@seismosoc.org. Submission-related questions should be addressed to the BSSA Editorial Office at bssamss@seismosoc.org.