2023 Australasian Actuarial Education and Research Symposium

John Townend and Laura Hughes — Invited Session

Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

Earthquakes and tsunami hazards in New Zealand — a geophysical perspective

New Zealand sits on the boundary between the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates and is exposed to a wide variety of geohazards including earthquakes, tsunami, landslides, and volcanic eruptions. Recent earthquakes and tsunami in New Zealand and elsewhere, notably the 2009–2011 Canterbury sequence, the 2004 Sumatra and 2011 Tōhoku earthquakes and tsunami, and the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake, have highlighted both the scale of the hazards these perils present to New Zealand and their complexity. A particular challenge is to reconcile scientific knowledge of processes operating on millennial timescales with the decadal timescales relevant to political and socioeconomic decision-making, and to fully account for uncertainties in hazard forecasts. In this presentation, Professor of Geophysics John Townend and PhD student Laura Hughes will summarise recent work to quantify the rates and effects of future geohazards using innovative observational and computational techniques in earthquake and tsunami science.