Predecessors of the giant 1960 Chile earthquake.

It is commonly thought that the longer the time since last earthquake, the larger the next earthquake's slip will be. But this logical predictor of earthquake size, unsuccessful for large earthquakes on a strike-slip fault, fails also with the giant 1960 Chile earthquake of magnitude 9.5 (ref.

Transient uplift after a 17th-century earthquake along the Kuril subduction zone.

In eastern Hokkaido, 60 to 80 kilometers above a subducting oceanic plate, tidal mudflats changed into freshwater forests during the first decades after a 17th-century tsunami. The mudflats gradually rose by a meter, as judged from fossil diatom assemblages. Both the tsunami and the ensuing uplift exceeded any in the region's 200 years of written history, and both resulted from a shallow plate-boundary earthquake of unusually large size along the Kuril subduction zone.

Unusually large earthquakes inferred from tsunami deposits along the Kuril trench.

The Pacific plate converges with northeastern Eurasia at a rate of 8-9 m per century along the Kamchatka, Kuril and Japan trenches. Along the southern Kuril trench, which faces the Japanese island of Hokkaido, this fast subduction has recurrently generated earthquakes with magnitudes of up to approximately 8 over the past two centuries. These historical events, on rupture segments 100-200 km long, have been considered characteristic of Hokkaido's plate-boundary earthquakes.