Most likely locations of large earthquakes in the Kanto and Tokai areas, Japan, based on the local recurrence times

We examined the hypothesis that minima in local recurrence time, T-L, or equivalently maxima in local probability, P-L, may map asperities in the Kanto and Tokai areas of Japan, where the earthquake catalog of the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED) is complete at the M = 1.5 (M1.5) level. We mapped TL (PL) based on the a- and b-values of the nearest earthquakes within 20 km of every node of a grid spaced 0.01degrees for M7 target events. Only earthquakes within the top 33 km were used. The b-values increase strongly with depth, in several areas. Therefore, some of the TL (PL) anomalies are not revealed if data from the entire crustal seismogenic zone are mixed. Thus, we mapped TL (PL) separately for the top 15 km and the rest of the depth range, as well as for the entire seismogenic crust. The resulting T-L- and P-L-maps show that approximately 12% of the total area shows anomalously short recurrence times. Out of six shallow target events with M greater than or equal to 6.5 and which occurred since 1890, five are located within the anomalous areas with T-L <450 years. We interpret this to mean that areas with anomalously short T-L map asperities, which are more likely than other areas to generate future target events. The probability that this result is due to chance is vanishingly small. The great Kanto rupture of 1923 appears to have initiated in the most significant asperity we mapped in the study area. One anomaly is located in the northeastern part of the area of the proposed future rupture of the Tokai earthquake, and another one at its southwestern corner. The absolute values of T-L calculated are uncertain because they depend on the size of the volume used for the calculation. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.