It's Our Fault: Better Defining the Earthquake Risk in Wellington - Results to Date & a Look to the Future

The goal of the It's Our Fault programme is to see Wellington positioned to become a more resilient city through a comprehensive study of the likelihood of large Wellington earthquakes, the size of these earthquakes, their effects and their impacts on humans and the built environment. Some key results to date include better definition and increased constraints on: 1) faulting in Cook Strait, 2) timing and size of past ruptures on the Wellington, Wairarapa, Wairau, and Ohariu faults, 3) state of locking of the subduction interface, and 4) fault interactions throughout the region, in particular rupture statistics of the Wellington-Wairarapa fault-pair. Current investigations are focused on characterisation of earthquake ground shaking behaviour in Wellington City and the Hutt Valley.