Wellington Fault
Fault in New Zealand
The Wellington Fault is an active seismic fault in the southern part of the North Island of New Zealand. It is a dextral (right-lateral) strike-slip fault with variable amounts of vertical movement causing uplift to the northwest, as expressed by a series of ranges. It forms part of the North Island Fault System, which accommodates the transfer of displacement along the oblique convergent boundary between the Indo-Australian Plate and Pacific Plate.
Geometry
The Wellington Fault consists of three main sections.
Wellington-Hutt Valley section
This 75 km long curved fault segment is mapped on the floor of Cook Strait before crossing the Wellington peninsula through Long Gully and along the northwestern edge of Wellington Harbour, past Lower Hutt terminating near Kaitoke. This segment has had a lateral slip-rate of 6.0–7.6 mm per year for at least the last 140,000 years, from the progressive offset of dated river terraces. The most recent rupture event along this section is constrained to 150–450 yrs BP (Before Present). This section is interpreted to give rise to characteristic earthquakes involving rupture of the entire fault segment, with a single-event displacement of 3.8–4.6 m. The recurrence interval is 500–770 years. The Kaitoke basin is a small pull-apart basin formed at the 2 km lateral offset between this segment and the Tararua segment, near Kaitoke.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wellington Fault” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.