New c. 270 kyr strike-slip and uplift rates for the southern Alpine Fault and implications for the New Zealand plate boundary

Along 100 km of the Alpine Fault, major valleys and glacial deposits can be matched across an 8000 m dextral offset. We use paleontologic and stratigraphic age constraints to date c. 270 ka marine sediments uplifted to 600 m elevation and overlying c. 270 ka glacial deposits related to the 8000 m dextral offset. These constraints yield a fault-proximal Australian plate uplift rate of 2.6 (-0.51+0.4) mm/yr and an Alpine Fault dextral slip rate of 29.6 (-2.5/+4.5) mm/yr. Our rates resolve an apparent along-strike drop in strike-slip rate and instead support a relatively constant along-strike dextral slip rate of 28 mm/yr (similar to 80% of current Australian-Pacific plate boundary motion). We argue that the rate of dextral slip on the southern Alpine Fault has been relatively constant over the last >= 3.5 myr, and that ductile fault processes may rate-limit the fault from accommodating a progressively higher percentage of plate boundary motion through time (i.e., the fault reached maturity long ago). The spatiotemporally constant strike-slip rate of the southern Alpine Fault and a previously published paleoseismic record of near-regular earthquake recurrence both characterize the Alpine Fault as a mature plate boundary fault zone that behaves in a constant way with behavior predictable over timescales of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.