1. Why conduct paleoliquefaction studies?

In many tectonic settings, the stronger earthquakes (say, M>6.5-7), which are the very seriously damaging earthquakes, tend to recur in about the same locale through time. The historic record is frequently too short to estimate the hazard in terms of earthquake magnitude or severity of shaking and, in many places, there are no surface faults to study for an assessment. Paleoliquefaction data offer a means to circumvent these deficiencies. The mere presence of seismically induced features such as sand volcanoes, lateral spreads, etc., indicates that the strength of shaking was high enough to have caused damage to man-made facilities. The threshold magnitude for inducing liquefaction is about M 5.5.