Abstract
The Yamasaki fault system is located from the eastern Okayama to Hyogo Prefectures, southwest Japan, trending in NW-SE direction with a length of 87 kilometers. Earthquake risk evaluation of this fault system is not complete because the past seismic events have not been determined throughout the fault system. This paper reports a comprehensive survey of the Ohara fault, located at the northwestern end of the fault system. High resolution electrical exploration and five drillings at Ohara Town clearly identified the location of the fault underneath the sediment cover. Trench survey was then carried out to determine the past seismic events along the Ohara fault. The following conclusions were derived from these studies. (1) The Ohara fault shows up as a sharp resistivity contrast in the high resolution electrical exploration, reflecting mainly the difference in resistivity between acid tuff and black slate that constitute the northern and southern sides of the fault, respectively. (2) The trench observation in the log and radiocarbon dating of sediments revealed that the latest fault movement along the Ohara fault occurred between 150 and 1200 years B. P. The Harima Earthquake of 868 years AD is most likely to correspond to this fault movement. The timing of the event roughly coincides with the latest event of the Yasutomi fault (Okada et al., 1987) comprising the central part of the Yamasaki fault system. This strongly suggests that the Ohara and Yasutomi faults ruptured simultaneously or as a sequence of events during the Harima Earthquake. (3) The penultimate movement of the Ohara fault was estimated between 1500 and 3000 years B. P. If the latest event corresponds to the Harima Earthquake, then the interval between the last two events is estimated to be 400 to 1900 years. (4) The present trench survey revealed possibly four events along the Ohara fault during the Holocene. Thus the recurrence interval may be about 2500 years. Comparing this result with the interval between the last two events, movement of this fault system is likely to be aperiodic.
