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Silicic lunar volcanism: Testing the crustal melting model

Lunar silicic rocks were first identified by granitic fragments found in samples brought to Earth by the Apollo missions, followed by the discovery of silicic domes on the lunar surface through remote sensing. Although these silicic lithologies are thought to make up a small portion of the lunar crust, their presence indicates that lunar crustal evolution is more complex than originally...
Authors
Amber L. Gullikson, Justin J. Hagerty, Mary R. Reid, Jennifer Rapp, David S. Draper

Along-strike variations in fault frictional properties along the San Andreas Fault near Cholame, California from joint earthquake and low-frequency earthquake relocations

Recent observations of low‐frequency earthquakes (LFEs) and tectonic tremor along the Parkfield–Cholame segment of the San Andreas fault suggest slow‐slip earthquakes occur in a transition zone between the shallow fault, which accommodates slip by a combination of aseismic creep and earthquakes ( 35  km depth). However,
Authors
Rebecca M. Harrington, Elizabeth S. Cochran, Emily M. Griffiths, Xiangfang Zeng, Clifford H. Thurber

Site effects in Port-au-Prince (Haiti) from the analysis of spectral ratio and numerical simulations.

To provide better insight into seismic ground motion in the Port‐au‐Prince metropolitan area, we investigate site effects at 12 seismological stations by analyzing 78 earthquakes with magnitude smaller than 5 that occurred between 2010 and 2013. Horizontal‐to‐vertical spectral ratio on earthquake recordings and a standard spectral ratio were applied to the seismic data. We also propose a...
Authors
Sadrac St. Fleur, Etienne Bertrand, Francoise Courboulex, Bernard Mercier de Lépinay, Anne Deschamps, Susan E. Hough, Giovanna Cultrera, Dominique Boisson, Claude Prepetit

Potentially induced earthquakes during the early twentieth century in the Los Angeles Basin

Recent studies have presented evidence that early to mid‐twentieth‐century earthquakes in Oklahoma and Texas were likely induced by fossil fuel production and/or injection of wastewater (Hough and Page, 2015; Frohlich et al., 2016). Considering seismicity from 1935 onward, Hauksson et al. (2015) concluded that there is no evidence for significant induced activity in the greater Los...
Authors
Susan E. Hough, Morgan T. Page

Rotational seismology

Rotational seismology is an emerging study of all aspects of rotational motions induced by earthquakes, explosions, and ambient vibrations. It is of interest to several disciplines, including seismology, earthquake engineering, geodesy, and earth-based detection of Einstein’s gravitation waves.Rotational effects of seismic waves, together with rotations caused by soil–structure...
Authors
William H. K. Lee

Complexity Theory

A complex system consists of many interacting parts, generates new collective behavior through self organization, and adaptively evolves through time. Many theories have been developed to study complex systems, including chaos, fractals, cellular automata, self organization, stochastic processes, turbulence, and genetic algorithms.
Authors
William H. K. Lee

A comparison of observed and predicted ground motions from the 2015 MW7.8 Gorkha, Nepal, earthquake

We use 21 strong motion recordings from Nepal and India for the 25 April 2015 moment magnitude (MW) 7.8 Gorkha, Nepal, earthquake together with the extensive macroseismic intensity data set presented by Martin et al. (Seism Res Lett 87:957–962, 2015) to analyse the distribution of ground motions at near-field and regional distances. We show that the data are consistent with the...
Authors
Susan E. Hough, Stacey S. Martin, V. Gahalaut, A. Joshi, M. Landes, R. Bossu

2016 update on induced earthquakes in the United States

During the past decade people living in numerous locations across the central U.S. experienced many more small to moderate sized earthquakes than ever before. This earthquake activity began increasing about 2009 and peaked during 2015 and into early 2016. For example, prior to 2009 Oklahoma typically experienced 1 or 2 small earthquakes per year with magnitude greater than 3.0 but by...
Authors
Mark D. Petersen

Alternative source models of very low frequency events

We present alternative source models for very low frequency (VLF) events, previously inferred to be radiation from individual slow earthquakes that partly fill the period range between slow slip events lasting thousands of seconds and low-frequency earthquakes (LFE) with durations of tenths of a second. We show that VLF events may emerge from bandpass filtering a sum of clustered...
Authors
Joan S. Gomberg, D.C. Agnew, S.Y. Schwartz

An investigation of soil-structure interaction effects observed at the MIT Green Building

The soil-foundation impedance function of the MIT Green Building is identified from its response signals recorded during an earthquake. Estimation of foundation impedance functions from seismic response signals is a challenging task, because: (1) the foundation input motions (FIMs) are not directly measurable, (2) the as-built properties of the super-structure are only approximately...
Authors
Ertugrul Taciroglu, Mehmet Çelebi, S. Farid Ghahari, Fariba Abazarsa

PhasePApy: A robust pure Python package for automatic identification of seismic phases

We developed a Python phase identification package: the PhasePApy for earthquake data processing and near‐real‐time monitoring. The package takes advantage of the growing number of Python libraries including Obspy. All the data formats supported by Obspy can be supported within the PhasePApy. The PhasePApy has two subpackages: the PhasePicker and the Associator, aiming to identify phase...
Authors
Chen Chen, Austin Holland
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