Landscape changes caused by the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake in Japan

Abstract

Landscapes are shaped by tectonic, climatic, and surface processes over geological timescales, but we rarely witness the events of marked landscape change. The moment magnitude 7.5 Noto Peninsula earthquake in central Japan was caused by a large thrust faulting, up to nearly 10 meters of slip, that expanded more than 150 kilometers along the fault zone. The deformation field reconstructed from satellite data and field surveys reveals up to 4.4 meters of uplift and associated coastal advance along the entire northern coast of the peninsula, meter-scale systematic movement of the mountain slopes consistent with slip on flexural faults, and activation of secondary inland faults, suggesting synchronized ruptures. The findings show excellent consistency between the coseismic deformation and geomorphic features and provide a vivid example of the role of a major earthquake in landscape formation.