Active Faults in Iberia

Active Faults in IberiaDetection and characterization of seismic sources are essential for obtaining realistic values of the seismic hazard in the Iberian Peninsula.The relatively low slip-rates yield high recurrence intervals of major and potentially destructive earthquakes in this area.The seismic catalog, which barely covers the last 2000 years, is therefore too short to obtain information from a complete seismic cycle.Thus, the geology and especially the paleoseismic record of active faults are indispensable tools to estimate and quantify the real seismogenic potential of Iberian active faults and the seismic hazard in the area.Active faults in Iberia have been detected and characterized.These geological data should be included in the seismic catalogs of Spain and Portugal in order to gain a better understanding of the seismic phenomena in the Peninsula.In recent years, an increasing number of active faults have been detected and characterized in the Iberian Peninsula.This trend has been accompanied by international initiatives such as the SHARE project (www.share-eu.org/) and the Global Earthquake Model; GEM (www.globalquakemodel.org),which seek to regularize, at both European and worldwide levels, the methodologies for calculating seismic hazard on the basis of geological data from active faults.In October 2010, the IBER-FAULT 2010 meeting (First Iberian Meeting on Active Faults and Paleoseismology, http://www.iberfault.org/iberfault_2010/) was held in Siguenza (Spain), bringing