Publications

The northern termination of the locked portion of the Hayward Fault near Berkeley, California, is found to coincide with the transition from strong Franciscan metagraywacke to melange on the western side of the fault. Both of these units are juxtaposed with various serpentinite, gabbro and graywacke units to the east, suggesting that the gouges formed within the Hayward Fault zone may vary widely

We develop a global database of building inventories using taxonomy of global building types for use in near-real-time post-earthquake loss estimation and pre-earthquake risk analysis, for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response (PAGER) program. The database is available for public use, subject to peer review, scrutiny, and open enhancement. On a country-b

The South American arc extends over 7,000 km, from the Chilean triple junction offshore of southern Chile to its intersection with the Panama fracture zone, offshore the southern coast of Panama in Central America. It marks the plate boundary between the subducting Nazca plate and the South America plate, where the oceanic crust and lithosphere of the Nazca plate begin their decent into the mantle

This map shows details of Japan and vicinity not visible in an earlier publication, U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Map 3064. Japan and its island possessions lie across four major tectonic plates: Pacific plate, North America plate; Eurasia plate; and Philippine Sea plate. The Pacific plate is subducted into the mantle, beneath Hokkaido and northern Honshu, along the eastern marg

This map shows details of the Kuril-Kamchatka arc not visible in an earlier publication, U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Map 3064. The arc extends about 2,100 km from Hokkaido, Japan, along the Kuril Islands and the pacific coast of the Kamchatka, Russia, peninsula to its intersection with the Aleutian arc near the Commander Islands, Russia. It marks the region where the Pacific p

This atlas presents an up-to-date map compilation of the geological and geophysical observations that underpin interpretations of active, surface-deforming faults in the Puget Lowland, Washington. Shallow lowland faults are mapped where observations of deformation from paleoseismic, seismic-reflection, and potential-field investigations converge. Together, results from these studies strengthen the

 The postseismic relaxation (postseismic displacement less displacement that would have occurred at the preseismic rate) measured by GPS and leveling following the 1989 MS7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake is reexamined. The temporal dependence of the relaxation over the first 1200 days postseismic is well described by 1 − e−t/τ, where τ = 414 ± 92 days. (Quoted uncertainties are standard deviations.) Tha

[1] The similarity of seismograms recorded by two seismic stations demonstrate that the 31 October 2007 moment magnitude M5.4 Alum Rock earthquake is a repeat of a 1955 ML5.5 earthquake. Both occurred on Oppenheimer et al.'s (1990) Zone V “stuck patch” on the central Calaveras fault, providing new support for their model of Calaveras fault earthquake activity. We suggest that Zone V fails only in

We study the source process of the Kīholo Bay earthquake (MW 6.7), which occurred beneath the northwest part of the Island of Hawai‘i on 15 October 2006, and static stress drops of small earthquakes that occurred in 2006 and 2007 around the main shock including aftershocks. We relocate the aftershocks to determine the fault plane from the two nodal planes. The relocated aftershocks define an E‐W t

No abstract available.

In response to a request by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for computing tsunami propagations in the western Pacific, Eric Geist asked Willie Lee for assistance in providing parameters of earthquakes which may be future tsunami sources. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Tsunami Source Working Group (TSWG) was initiated in August 2005. An ad hoc group of diverse expertis

Earthquake engineering practice is increasingly using nonlinear response history analysis (RHA) to demonstrate performance of structures. This rigorous method of analysis requires selection and scaling of ground motions appropriate to design hazard levels. Presented herein is a modal-pushover-based scaling (MPS) method to scale ground motions for use in nonlinear RHA of buildings and bridges. In