Development of magnitude-bound relations for paleoliquefaction analyses: New Zealand case study

Abstract

Magnitude-bound relations are often used to estimate paleoearthquake magnitudes from paleoliquefaction data. This study proposes New Zealand-based magnitude-bound curves that are developed using (a) liquefaction field observations and (b) a newly proposed back-calculation approach that combines the simplified liquefaction evaluation procedure with a regionally appropriate ground motion prediction equation. For (b) both deterministic and probabilistic frameworks are proposed. The magnitude bound curves back-calculated using either the deterministic or probabilistic frameworks are advantageous in that they can be used to predict the spatial distribution of liquefaction in regions where histori..