Collaborative Research: Filling in the past 700 years of paleoearthquakes at the Elizabeth Lake paleoseismic site, Mojave section of the southern San Andreas fault

Despite the recent development of several high-quality paleoseismic records for sites on the southern San Andreas fault (Figure 1), the distance between some of these sites remains too great to reliably test models of earthquake behavior and understand possible persistent segmentation of earthquake ruptures. Because the earthquake record from Bidart Fan (Akçiz et al., 2010) and Frazier Mountain are very similar (Figure 2), but quite different from that of Pallett Creek (Scharer et al. 2011), last year we began new paleoseismic investigations at Elizabeth Lake, CA. This location splits a 100 km gap between Pallett Creek and Frazier Mountain that is large enough to hold its own M7 earthquakes, and the site has the stratigraphic potential to provide important constraints on the extent and timing of ruptures along the Mojave section of the southern San Andreas fault over the past 1000 years (Bemis et al., 2012).