Publications
Educational Publications
Educational Publications
Selected publications about earthquakes In plain language.
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Strategies for rapid global earthquake impact estimation: the Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response (PAGER) system
This chapter summarizes the state-of-the-art for rapid earthquake impact estimation. It details the needs and challenges associated with quick estimation of earthquake losses following global earthquakes, and provides a brief literature review of various approaches that have been used in the past. With this background, the chapter introduces the operational earthquake loss estimation system develo
Authors
Kishor Jaiswal, D. J. Wald
Assessing the location and magnitude of the 20 October 1870 Charlevoix, Quebec, earthquake
The Charlevoix, Quebec, earthquake of 20 October 1870 caused damage to several towns in Quebec and was felt throughout much of southeastern Canada and along the U.S. Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Maryland. Site‐specific damage and felt reports from Canadian and U.S. cities and towns were used in analyses of the location and magnitude of the earthquake. The macroseismic center of the earthquake w
Authors
John E. Ebel, Megan Dupuy, William H. Bakun
Comment on “Why earthquake hazard maps often fail and what to do about it” by S. Stein, R. Geller, and M. Liu
No abstract available.
Authors
Arthur Frankel
Constraints on behaviour of a mining‐induced earthquake inferred from laboratory rock mechanics experiments
On December 12, 2004, an earthquake of magnitude 2.2, located in the TauTona Gold Mine at a depth of about 3.65 km in the ancient Pretorius fault zone, was recorded by the in-mine borehole seismic network, yielding an excellent set of ground motion data recorded at hypocentral distances of several km. From these data, the seismic moment tensor, indicating mostly normal faulting with a small implos
Authors
Arthur F. McGarr, Malcolm J. S. Johnston, M. Boettcher, V. Heesakkers, Z. Reches
Origin of the Blytheville Arch, and long-term displacement on the New Madrid seismic zone, central United States
The southern arm of the New Madrid seismic zone of the central United States coincides with the buried, ~110 km by ~20 km Blytheville Arch antiform within the Cambrian–Ordovician Reelfoot rift graben. The Blytheville Arch has been interpreted at various times as a compressive structure, an igneous intrusion, or a sediment diapir. Reprocessed industry seismic-reflection profiles presented here show
Authors
Thomas L. Pratt, Robert Williams, Jackson K. Odum, William J. Stephenson
Megacity megaquakes—Two near misses
Two recent earthquakes left their mark on Santiago de Chile and Tokyo, well beyond the rupture zones, raising questions about the future vulnerability of these and other cities that lie in seismically active regions. Though spared strong shaking, the megacities nevertheless lit up in small quakes, perhaps signaling an abrupt change in the condition for failure on the faults beneath the cities. To
Authors
Ross S. Stein, Shinji Toda
Observed source parameters for dynamic rupture with non-uniform initial stressand relatively high fracture energy
We have conducted dynamic rupture propagation experiments to establish the relations between in-source stress drop, fracture energy and the resulting particle velocity during slip of an unconfined 2 m long laboratory fault at normal stresses between 4 and 8 MPa. To produce high fracture energy in the source we use a rough fault that has a large slip weakening distance. An artifact of the high frac
Authors
Nicholas M. Beeler, Brian D. Kilgore, Arthur F. McGarr, Jon Peter B. Fletcher, John R. Evans, Steven R. Baker
Aftershocks halted by static stress shadows
Earthquakes impart static and dynamic stress changes to the surrounding crust. Sudden fault slip causes small but permanent—static—stress changes, and passing seismic waves cause large, but brief and oscillatory—dynamic—stress changes. Because both static and dynamic stresses can trigger earthquakes within several rupture dimensions of a mainshock, it has proven difficult to disentangle their cont
Authors
Shinji Toda, Ross S. Stein, Gregory C. Beroza, David Marsan
Sources of shaking and flooding during the Tohoku-Oki earthquake: a mixture of rupture styles
Modeling strong ground motions from great subduction zone earthquakes is one of the great challenges of computational seismology. To separate the rupture characteristics from complexities caused by 3D sub-surface geology requires an extraordinary data set such as provided by the recent Mw9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake. Here we combine deterministic inversion and dynamically guided forward simulation me
Authors
Shengji Wei, Robert Graves, Don Helmberger, Jean-Philippe Avouac, Junle Jiang
Significant motions between GPS sites in the New Madrid region: implications for seismic hazard
Position time series from Global Positioning System (GPS) stations in the New Madrid region were differenced to determine the relative motions between stations. Uncertainties in rates were estimated using a three‐component noise model consisting of white, flicker, and random walk noise, following the methodology of Langbein, 2004. Significant motions of 0.37±0.07 (one standard error) mm/yr were fo
Authors
Arthur Frankel, Robert Smalley, J. Paul
New Zealand’s deadliest quake sounds alarm for cities on fault lines
The catastrophic Christ Church Earthquake is a strong reminder to engineers and scientists of the hazards pose by fault lines, both mapped and unknown, near major cities. In February 2011, the relatively moderate earthquake that struck the cities of Christchurch and Lyttleton in the Canterbury region of New Zealand's South Island surprised many with its destructive power. The magnitude 6.2 temblor
Authors
Erol Kalkan
Seismic structure of the crust and uppermost mantle of South America and surrounding oceanic basins
We present a new set of contour maps of the seismic structure of South America and the surrounding ocean basins. These maps include new data, helping to constrain crustal thickness, whole-crustal average P-wave and S-wave velocity, and the seismic velocity of the uppermost mantle (Pn and Sn). We find that: (1) The weighted average thickness of the crust under South America is 38.17 km (standard de
Authors
Gary S. Chulick, Shane Detweiler, Walter D. Mooney