Evaluation of geodetic and geologic datasets in the Northern Walker Lane-Summary and recommendations of the Workshop

The Northern Walker Lane comprises a complex network of active faults in northwestern Nevada and northeastern California bound on the west by the Sierra Nevada and on the east by the extensional Basin and Range Province. Because deformation is distributed across sets of discontinuous faults, it is particularly challenging to integrate geologic and geodetic data in the NWL to assess the region's seismic hazard. Recent GPS measurements show that roughly one centimeter per year of relative displacement is accumulating across a zone about 100 km wide at the latitude of Reno, Nevada, but it is not clear where or how much of this strain might ultimately be released in damaging earthquakes. Despite decades of work in the region, the sum of documented late Pleistocene to recent slip rates is distinctly less than the GPS-measured relative displacement.