| Central Taiwan is subject to a substantial long-term earthquake risk with a population of five million and two disastrous earthquakes in the last century, the 1935 ML=7.1 Tuntzuchiao and 1999 Mw=7.6 Chi-Chi earthquakes. Rich data from these earthquakes combined with substantial surface and subsurface data accumulated from petroleum exploration form the basis for these studies of the growth of structures in successive large earthquakes and their relationships to pore-fluid pressures.; Chapter 1 documents the structural context of the bedding-parallel Chelungpu thrust that slipped in the Chi-Chi earthquake by showing for this richly instrumented earthquake the close geometric relationships between the complex 3D fault shape and the heterogeneous coseismic displacements constrained by geodesy and seismology. Chapter 2 studies the accumulation of deformation by successive large earthquakes by studying the deformation of flights of fluvial terraces deposited over the Chelungpu and adjacent Changhua thrusts, showing the deformation on a timescale of tens of thousands of years. Furthermore these two structures, involving the same stratigraphic sequence, show fundamentally different kinematics of deformation with associated contrasting hanging-wall structural geometries. The heights and shapes of deformed terraces allowed testing of existing theories of fault-related folding. Furthermore terrace dating constrains a combined shortening rate of 37 mm/yr, which is 45% of the total Taiwan plate-tectonic rate, and indicates a substantial earthquake risk for the Changhua thrust.; Chapter 3 addresses the long-standing problem of the mechanics of long-thing thrust sheets, such as the Chelungpu and Changhua thrusts in western Taiwan, by presenting a natural test for the classic Hubbert-Rubey hypothesis, which argues that ambient excess pore-fluid pressure substantially reduces the effective fault friction allowing the thrusts to move. Pore-fluid pressure data obtained from 76 wells in western Taiwan show that these and other thrust detachments are either not overpressured or are only mildly overpressured at depths less that ∼10 km. In contrast the Chelungpu-Changhua detachment is shown to be exceedingly weak, indicating that the classic Hubbert-Rubey mechanism is not viable in western Taiwan. Therefore non-Hubbert-Rubey mechanisms are likely to be important for the problem of weak faults. |
