The surge of great earthquakes from 2004 to 2014

During the decade from mid-2004 to mid-2014 18 great (M-w >= 8.0) earthquakes occurred globally (similar to 1.8 per year), compared to 71 from 1900 to mid-2004 (similar to 0.68 per year), yielding a short-term rate increase of 265%. Six events had M-w >= 8.5, larger than any prior event since the 1965 Rat Islands earthquake. The December 26, 2004 M-w 9.2 Sumatra earthquake had the longest recorded rupture length of 1300+ km and a rupture duration exceeding 450 s. The largest recorded strike-slip earthquake (M-w 8.7) occurred in the Indo-Australian plate on April 11, 2012. The largest recorded deep focus earthquake (M-w 8.3) occurred under the Sea of Okhotsk on May 24, 2013. While this overall surge of activity has not been demonstrated to be causally linked, regional spatio-temporal clustering is clearly evident for great events along the Sumatra, Kuril and Tonga subduction zones, and longer-range interactions have been established for global seismicity and seismic tremor at lower magnitudes following some of the events. This recent decade of intense great earthquake activity coincided with vastly expanded global networks of seismometers, GPS stations, tsunami gauges, and new satellite imaging capabilities such as InSAR and LandSAT interferometry and gravity measurements by GRACE and GOCE, enabling unprecedented analyses of precursory, co-seismic and post-seismic processes around the subduction zone environments where most of the events occurred. Individual events such as the March 11. 2011, Tohoku, Japan M-w 9.0 earthquake produced more ground motion and tsunami recordings than available for all great earthquakes of the last century collectively. Joint inversion and modeling of the diverse data sets exploit complementary sensitivity of the signals to different aspects of the earthquake processes. Major advances have been achieved in quantifying frictional locking and strain accumulation prior to some great events and in relating it to co-seismic slip heterogeneity. Many surprising aspects of these well-quantified great earthquakes have been manifested, associated with their rupture dimensions, tectonic location, compound faulting, triggering interactions, slow slip and foreshock migration precursors, aftershock complexity, and depth-varying seismic radiation characteristics. Regions with potential for near-future great ruptures include mature seismic gaps along the Mentawai Islands and northern Chile, as well as western North America and the Himalayan front, so more great earthquake activity can certainly be anticipated. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.