Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Publications

Filter Total Items: 1857

Response study of the tallest California building inferred from the Mw7.1 Ridgecrest, California earthquake of 5 July 2019 and ambient motions

The newly constructed tallest building in California, the 73-story Wilshire Grand in Los Angeles, California, is designed in conformance with performance-based design procedures. The building is designed with concrete core–shear walls, three outriggers with buckling restrained braces (BRBs) located along the height, and two three-story truss-belt structural systems. The building is equipped with a
Authors
Mehmet Çelebi, S. Farid Ghahari, Hamid Haddadi, Ertugrul Taciroglu

Coupling of Indo-Pacific climate variability over the last millennium

The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) impacts climate and rainfall across the world, and most severely in nations surrounding the Indian Ocean1-4. The frequency and intensity of positive IOD events increased during the 20th Century5 and may continue to intensify in a warming world6; however, confidence in future IOD changes is limited by known biases in model representations of the IOD7 and the lack of in
Authors
Nerilie J. Abram, Nicky M. Wright, Bethany Ellis, Bronwyn C. Dixon, Jennifer B. Wurtzel, Matthew H. England, Caroline C. Ummenhofer, Belle E. Philibosian, Sri Yudawati Cahyarini, Tsai-Luen Yu, Chuan-Chou Shen, Hai Cheng, R. Lawrence Edwards, David Heslop

An analysis of the factors that control fault zone architecture and the importance of fault orientation relative to regional stress

The moment magnitude 7.2 El Mayor−Cucapah (EMC) earthquake of 2010 in northern Baja California, Mexico produced a cascading rupture that propagated through a geometrically diverse network of intersecting faults. These faults have been exhumed from depths of 6−10 km since the late Miocene based on low-temperature thermochronology, synkinematic alteration, and deformational fabrics. Coseismic slip o
Authors
John Fletcher, Orlando Teran, Tom Rockwell, Michael E. Oskin, Kenneth W. Hudnut, Ronald Spelz, Pierre Lacan, Mathew Dorsey, Giles Ostermijer, Thomas M. Mitchell, Sinan Akciz, Ana Paula Hernandez-Flores, Alejandro Hinojosa-Corona, Ivan Peña-Villa, David K. Lynch

Basin amplification effects in the Puget Lowland, Washington from strong motion recordings and 3D simulations

Sedimentary basins in the Puget Sound region, Washington State, increase ground‐motion intensity and duration of shaking during local earthquakes. We analyze Pacific Northwest Seismic Network and U.S. Geological Survey strong‐motion recordings of five local earthquakes (M 3.9–6.8), including the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, to characterize sedimentary basin effects within the Seattle and Tacoma basi
Authors
Mika Thompson, Erin Wirth, Arthur Frankel, J. Renate Hartog, John E. Vidale

Plastic faulting in ice

Plastic faulting is a brittle‐like failure phenomenon exhibited by water ice and several other rock types under confinement. It is suspected to be the mechanism of deep earthquakes and extreme cases of shear localization in shallow rocks. Unlike ordinary Coulombic failure, plastic faulting is characterized by a pressure‐independent failure strength and fault plane oriented 45° to maximum principal
Authors
Narayama Golding, William B Durham, David J Prior, Laura A. Stern

Final report to SCEC on the January 8, 2020 SCEC workshop 'Dynamic Rupture TAG Ingredients Workshop – Fault Friction (SCEC Project 19121)'

This workshop was the second of a series of four SCEC5 workshops designed to evaluate the importance of each of the four ingredients required for dynamic earthquake rupture simulations. The four ingredients are: initial stress conditions, fault geometry, rock properties, and fault friction (Figure 1). This workshop included a range of views of how fault friction operates in the Earth, based on i
Authors
Ruth A. Harris, Michael Barall

Hybrid broadband ground motion simulation validation of small magnitude earthquakes in Canterbury, New Zealand

Ground motion simulation validation is an important and necessary task toward establishing the efficacy of physics-based ground motion simulations for seismic hazard analysis and earthquake engineering applications. This article presents a comprehensive validation of the commonly used Graves and Pitarka hybrid broadband ground motion simulation methodology with a recently developed three-dimension
Authors
Robin L. Lee, Brendon A. Bradley, Peter J. Stafford, Robert Graves, Adrian Rodriguez-Marek

The community code verification exercise for simulating sequences of earthquakes and aseismic slip (SEAS)

Numerical simulations of sequences of earthquakes and aseismic slip (SEAS) have made great progress over past decades to address important questions in earthquake physics. However, significant challenges in SEAS modeling remain in resolving multiscale interactions between earthquake nucleation, dynamic rupture, and aseismic slip, and understanding physical factors controlling observables such as s
Authors
Brittany Erickson, Junle Jiang, Michael Barall, Nadia Lapusta, Eric Dunham, Ruth A. Harris, Lauren Abrahams, Kali Allison, Jean-Paul Ampuero, Sylvain Barbot, Camilla Cattania, Ahmed Elbanna, Yuri Fialko, Benjamin Idini, Jeremy Kozdon, Valere Lambert, Yajing Liu, Yingdi Luo, Xiao Ma, Maricela Best McKay, Paul Segall, Pengsheng Shi, Martijn van den Ende, Mengjie Wei

Potential duration of aftershocks of the 2020 southwestern Puerto Rico earthquake

AbstractAftershocks (earthquakes clustered spatially and chronologically near the occurrence of a causative earthquake) are ongoing in southwestern Puerto Rico after a series of earthquakes, which include a magnitude 6.4 earthquake that occurred near Barrio Indios, Guayanilla, on January 7, 2020, and affected the surrounding area. This report estimates the expected duration of these aftershocks by
Authors
Nicholas van der Elst, Jeanne L. Hardebeck, Andrew J. Michael

Revision of Boore (2018) Ground‐motion predictions for Central and Eastern North America: Path and offset adjustments and extension to 200 m/s <= Vs30 <= 3000 m/s

The three sets of ground‐motion predictions (GMPs) of Boore (2018; hereafter, B18) are compared with a much larger dataset than was used in deriving the predictions. The B18 GMPs work well for response spectra at periods between ∼0.15∼0.15 and 4.0 s after an adjustment accounting for a path bias at distances beyond 200 km—this was the maximum distance used to derive the stress parameters on which
Authors
David Boore

Caltech/USGS Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN) and Southern California Earthquake Data Center (SCEDC): Data availability for the 2019 Ridgecrest sequence

The 2019 M6.4 and M7.1 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence occurred in the eastern California shear zone (ECSZ). The mainshock ruptured the Little Lake fault zone and aftershocks extended from the Garlock fault in the south, to the southern end of the 1872 M7.5 Owens Valley earthquake rupture in the north. We present data from the Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN) and partner seismic networks
Authors
Egill Hauksson, Clara Yoon, Ellen Yu, Jennifer Andrews, Mark Alvarez, Rayo Bhadha, Valerie Thomas

The U.S. Geological Survey’s Rapid Seismic Array Deployment for the 2019 Ridgecrest Earthquake Sequence

Rapid seismic deployments following large earthquakes capture ephemeral near‐field recordings of aftershocks and ambient noise that can provide valuable data for seismological studies. The U.S. Geological Survey installed 19 temporary seismic stations following the 4 July 2019 Mw 6.4 and 6 July 2019 (UTC) Mw 7.1 earthquakes near the city of Ridgecrest, California. The stations record the aftershoc
Authors
Elizabeth S. Cochran, Emily Wolin, Daniel E. McNamara, Alan Yong, David C. Wilson, Mark Alvarez, Nicholas van der Elst, Adria Ruth McClain, Jamison Haase Steidl