Review of paleoseismological and active fault studies in Taiwan in the light of the Chichi earthquake of September 21, 1999

This paper reviews the research on active and earthquake faults in Taiwan conducted prior and after the 1999 Chichi earthquake. The Chichi earthquake plays as a turning point of the relevant studies, since the 1999 coseismic surface rupture exactly follows preexisting fault scarps, created in turn by previous seismic events along the Chelungpu Fault. This fact indicates that the precise mapping on the other active faults is fundamental to predict the location of surface rupture caused by large future earthquakes. Since 1999, many trenching studies have been carried out along the Chichi earthquake fault. A few of them demonstrates that the penultimate event is as young as probably only 200–430 years old; however, some others show a rather old age of several hundreds years or even older for the last faulting event before 1999. More trenching studies are necessary for such a long fault in order to understand the possible segmentation features and the correlation of the paleoseismic events identified along the entire fault length. In addition, we further discuss the offshore faulting associated with seismic event along the eastern coast of Taiwan, where the multiple Holocene terraces are well known