Displacement along the Haiyuan fault associated with the great 1920 Haiyuan, China, earthquake

Abstract We used a plane table and an alidade to construct detailed topographic maps of offset features (stream channels, dry gullies, and old terrace walls) along the fault zone that ruptured during the 1920 Haiyuan earthquake ( M = 8.7) in Ningxia and Gansu, China. The maximum displacement appears to have reached 10 m at Shikaguangou between the Salt Lake and Xianzhou basins in southern Ningxia. The average displacement along the 100 km of the fault that we studied was about 8 m. Assuming that the average slip rate to be between 5 and 10 mm/yr, the recurrence interval for events similar to that in 1920 would be about 800 to 1600 yr.