NHESSD Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences Discussions NHESSD Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss. 2195-9269 Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/nhess-2017-381 Tree-ring response to the 1995 M<sub>w</sub> 7.2 Kobe earthquake, southwest Japan Lin Sujian 1 Lin Aiming 2 Department of Bilological Science, Faculty of Life and Environmental Science, Shimane University, Matsue 690-0823, Japan Department of Geophysics, Graduate School of Science Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan 23 11 2017 2017 1 20 Copyright: © 2017 Sujian Lin 2017 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://nhess.copernicus.org/preprints/nhess-2017-381/ The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://nhess.copernicus.org/preprints/nhess-2017-381/nhess-2017-381.pdf

The 1995 M<sub>w</sub> 7.2 Kobe earthquake produced an ~&thinsp;18&thinsp;km-long surface rupture zone with a maximum right-lateral displacement of ~&thinsp;1.8&thinsp;m along the pre-existing active Nojima Fault in southwest Japan. Field investigations showed that the co-seismic surface ruptures caused severe damage to trees, some of which survived the disaster during the past twenty years along the co-seismic fault scarp. Analysis of tree-rings from the trunk of a 46-year-old Beech tree (Fagus crenata Blume) revealed that the tree was cracked by earthquake-induced damage and that the tree-rings grown during the five-year period after the 1995 earthquake become sharply narrower in width compared to those grown before the earthquake. Our findings indicate that the earthquake damaged trees along the co-seismic fault scarp and hindered the growth of tree-rings by severing the roots. Thus, the results support the idea that older trees growing along or around fault zones can be used for identifying seismic fault events and for dendrochronological studies related to geomorphological processes.