Publications

Uplift as a function of time from 1951 through 1990 has been deduced from annual mean sea level measured at 15 tide gages along the Nankai subduction zone, southwest Japan. The recurrence interval for rupture of the Nankai subduction zone is about 100 years, and the most recent rupture was in late 1946. Thus the 1951–1990 uplift record covers most of the first half of the earthquake cycle. The pre

This report describes the acquisition of deep-crustal multichannel seismic-reflection data in the Inner California Borderland aboard the R/V Maurice Ewing, conducted in October 1994 as part of the Los Angeles Regional Seismic Experiment (LARSE). LARSE is a cooperative study of the crustal structure of southern California involving earth scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, Caltech, the Univ

This Circular provides a general description of the types of geologic hazards that exist throughout the United States. In nontechnical language this book describes how geologic information can be incorporated in the land-use development process and contains useful discussion of several examples from the San Francisco Bay area and elsewhere in the United States of how geologic information is alread

Seismic techniques provide the highest‐resolution measurements of the structure of the crust and have been conducted on a worldwide basis. We summarize the structure of the continental crust based on the results of seismic refraction profiles and infer crustal composition as a function of depth by comparing these results with high‐pressure laboratory measurements of seismic velocity for a wide ran

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

In 1971, the near-failure of a dam during a magnitude 6.7 earthquake forced 80,000 people to evacuate their residences. In 1994, the replacement dam survived an almost identical earthquake with little damage. Underlying this progress in designing critical structures are years of research on the powerful shaking during large earthquakes.

We present an interpretation of crustal seismic refraction data from the Peninsular terrane, one of the many exotic terranes that have been accreted to the continental margin of southern Alaska in the past 200 m.y. A seismic refraction line was collected along the Glenn Highway in the Copper River Basin of south central Alaska in 1984 and 1985, as part of the U.S. Geological Survey Trans‐Alaska Cr

We investigate the physical setting of the Bolivian shock based on the history of the subducting Nazca plate, intraslab seismicity, deep seismic moment release, and seismic tomography. South America has two broad regions of reverse arc curvature. Subduction constrained to this unique geometry produces slab kinking contortions that may cause unusual slab thickening as they sink to the bottom of the

We present a systematic investigation of the variation with depth of the frequency of earthquake occurrence vs. seismic moment based on 16 years of Harvard Centroid Moment Tensor (CMT) solutions. We analyze depth variations of earthquake size distribution in terms of variations in the absolute value of the slope of the regression of the logarithm of the population vs. seismic moment, a quantity kn

Odds are 2-in-3 that at least one disastrous earthquake will strike the San Francisco Bay Area before 2020. Faced with this threat, corporations and government agencies have stepped up efforts that will reduce future losses by billions of dollars.

In this century, major earthquakes in the United States have damaged or destroyed numerous buildings, bridges, and other structures. By monitoring how structures respond to earthquakes and applying the knowledge gained, scientists and engineers are improving the ability of structures to survive major earthquakes. Many lives and millions of dollars have already been saved by this ongoing research.