It is commonly thought that the longer the time since last earthquake, the larger the next earthquake's slip will be. But this logical predictor of earthquake size, unsuccessful for large earthquakes on a strike-slip fault, fails also with the giant 1960 Chile earthquake of magnitude 9.5 (ref. 3). Although the time since the preceding earthquake spanned 123 years (refs 4, 5), the estimated slip in 1960, which occurred on a fault between the Nazca and South American tectonic plates, equalled 250-350 years' worth of the plate motion. Thus the average interval between such giant earthquakes on this fault should span several centuries. Here we present evidence that such long intervals were indeed typical of the last two millennia. We use buried soils and sand layers as records of tectonic subsidence and tsunami inundation at an estuary midway along the 1960 rupture. In these records, the 1960 earthquake ended a recurrence interval that had begun almost four centuries before, with an earthquake documented by Spanish conquistadors in 1575. Two later earthquakes, in 1737 and 1837, produced little if any subsidence or tsunami at the estuary and they therefore probably left the fault partly loaded with accumulated plate motion that the 1960 earthquake then expended.

Can the magnitude of a giant earthquake be estimated from paleoseismological data alone? Attempts to estimate the size of the Jogan earthquake of AD 869, whose tsunami affected much of the same coast as the 2011 Tohoku tsunami, offers an excellent opportunity to address this question, which is fundamental to assessing earthquake and tsunami hazards at subduction zones. Between 2004 and 2010, examining stratigraphy at 399 locations beneath paddy fields along 180 km of coast mainly south of Sendai, we learned that a tsunami deposit associated with the AD 869 Jogan earthquake had run inland at least 1.5 km across multiple coastal lowlands, and that one of the lowlands had subsided during the Jogan earthquake and an earlier earthquake as well. Radiocarbon ages just below/above sand deposits left by the pre‐Jogan tsunamis suggested recurrence intervals in the range of 500 to 800 years. Modeling inundation and subsidence, we estimated size of the Jogan earthquake as moment magnitude 8.4 or larger and a fault rupture area 200 km long. We did not consider a longer rupture, like the one in 2011, because coastal landform and absence of a volcanic ash layer make any Jogan layer difficult to identify along the Sanriku coast. Still, Sendai tsunami geology might have reduced casualties by improving evacuation maps and informing public‐awareness campaigns.

In eastern Hokkaido, 60 to 80 kilometers above a subducting oceanic plate, tidal mudflats changed into freshwater forests during the first decades after a 17th-century tsunami. The mudflats gradually rose by a meter, as judged from fossil diatom assemblages. Both the tsunami and the ensuing uplift exceeded any in the region's 200 years of written history, and both resulted from a shallow plate-boundary earthquake of unusually large size along the Kuril subduction zone. This earthquake probably induced more creep farther down the plate boundary than did any of the region's historical events.