Publications

The State of Wisconsin is not known for earthquake activity. The authoritative public‐facing U.S. Geological Survey Comprehensive Catalog of earthquakes includes only three small (magnitude < 2) earthquakes in the state, all instrumentally recorded. Although other catalogs include more events in Wisconsin, experience has shown that many types of events, such as explosions and cryoseisms, have made

We describe recent improvements to the Third Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast ETAS Model (UCERF3‐ETAS), which continues to represent our most advanced and complete earthquake forecast in terms of relaxing segmentation assumptions and representing multifault ruptures, elastic‐rebound effects, and spatiotemporal clustering (the latter to represent aftershocks and otherwise triggered ev

We investigate whether assuming a fixed shallow depth in the ShakeAlert network‐based earthquake early warning system is sufficient to produce accurate ground‐motion based alerts for intraslab earthquakes. ShakeAlert currently uses a fixed focal depth of 8 km to estimate earthquake location and magnitude. This is an appropriate way to reduce computational costs without compromising alert accuracy

Improving our understanding of hazards posed by future large earthquakes on the Cascadia Subduction Zone requires advancements in the methods and sampling used to date and characterize past events.

Four new latest Pleistocene slip rates from two sites along the northwestern half of the San Bernardino strand of the San Andreas fault suggest the slip rate decreases southeastward as slip transfers from the Mojave section of the San Andreas fault onto the northern San Jacinto fault zone. At Badger Canyon, offsets coupled with radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages provide t

We develop semi-empirical ground motion models (GMMs) for peak ground acceleration, peak ground velocity, and 5%-damped pseudo-spectral accelerations for periods from 0.01 to 10 s, for the median orientation-independent horizontal component of subduction earthquake ground motion. The GMMs are applicable to interface and intraslab subduction earthquakes in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Central America, So

In the United States, a wide variety of studies show that the geoscience community does not reflect the broader societal makeup (e.g., Velasco and Jaurrieta de Velasco, 2010; Dutt, 2020; Howley, 2020). In fact, only about 10% of all Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Ph.D. degrees are awarded to people of color, although they represent more than a third of the population (Dut

The geologic slip rate on the Mojave section of the San Andreas fault is poorly constrained, despite its importance for understanding earthquake hazard, apparent discrepancies between geologic and geodetic slip rates along this fault section, and long‐term fault interactions in southern California. Here, we use surficial geologic mapping, excavations, and radiocarbon and luminescence dating to qua

CO2 and CH4 clathrate hydrates are of keen interest for energy and carbon cycle considerations. While both typically form on Earth as cubic structure I (sI), we find that pure CO2 hydrate exhibits over an order of magnitude higher electrical conductivity (σ) than pure CH4 hydrate at geologically relevant temperatures. The conductivity was obtained from frequency-dependent impedance (Z) measurement

The largest earthquake since 1954 to strike the state of Nevada, United States, ruptured on 15 May 2020 along the Monte Cristo range of west‐central Nevada. The Mw 6.5 event involved predominantly left‐lateral strike‐slip faulting with minor normal components on three aligned east–west‐trending faults that vary in strike by 23°. The kinematic rupture process is determined by joint inversion of Glo

In this article, we present an overview of the research project NGA-East, Next Generation Attenuation for Central and Eastern North America (CENA), and summarize the key methodology and products. The project was tasked with developing a new ground motion characterization (GMC) model for CENA. The final NGA-East GMC model includes a set of 17 median ground motion models (GMMs) for peak ground accel

Traditional ground-motion models (GMMs) are used to compute pseudo-spectral acceleration (PSA) from future earthquakes and are generally developed by regression of PSA using a physics-based functional form. PSA is a relatively simple metric that correlates well with the response of several engineering systems and is a metric commonly used in engineering evaluations; however, characteristics of the