Publications

This Circular provides a general description of the types of geologic hazards that exist throughout the United States. In nontechnical language this book describes how geologic information can be incorporated in the land-use development process and contains useful discussion of several examples from the San Francisco Bay area and elsewhere in the United States of how geologic information is alread

Seismic techniques provide the highest‐resolution measurements of the structure of the crust and have been conducted on a worldwide basis. We summarize the structure of the continental crust based on the results of seismic refraction profiles and infer crustal composition as a function of depth by comparing these results with high‐pressure laboratory measurements of seismic velocity for a wide ran

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

In 1971, the near-failure of a dam during a magnitude 6.7 earthquake forced 80,000 people to evacuate their residences. In 1994, the replacement dam survived an almost identical earthquake with little damage. Underlying this progress in designing critical structures are years of research on the powerful shaking during large earthquakes.

Near real-time monitoring of seismic events and status of portable 16-bit digital recorders has been established for arrays near Parkfield, Mammoth Lakes, and San Francisco, California. This monitoring system provides near real-time seismic event identification (rough location and magnitude) and a cost-effective means to maintain arrays at near 100% operational level. Principal objectives in the d

We present an interpretation of crustal seismic refraction data from the Peninsular terrane, one of the many exotic terranes that have been accreted to the continental margin of southern Alaska in the past 200 m.y. A seismic refraction line was collected along the Glenn Highway in the Copper River Basin of south central Alaska in 1984 and 1985, as part of the U.S. Geological Survey Trans‐Alaska Cr

Immediately following the Jan. 17, 1995, Kobe earthquake, a reconnaissance team was organized under the auspices of the Earthquake Hazard Mitigation Program of the Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation. The mission of the team was to provide a timely, first-hand overview of the type and extent of the damage, and to provide the necessary background information for future resear

We investigate the physical setting of the Bolivian shock based on the history of the subducting Nazca plate, intraslab seismicity, deep seismic moment release, and seismic tomography. South America has two broad regions of reverse arc curvature. Subduction constrained to this unique geometry produces slab kinking contortions that may cause unusual slab thickening as they sink to the bottom of the

We present a systematic investigation of the variation with depth of the frequency of earthquake occurrence vs. seismic moment based on 16 years of Harvard Centroid Moment Tensor (CMT) solutions. We analyze depth variations of earthquake size distribution in terms of variations in the absolute value of the slope of the regression of the logarithm of the population vs. seismic moment, a quantity kn

Odds are 2-in-3 that at least one disastrous earthquake will strike the San Francisco Bay Area before 2020. Faced with this threat, corporations and government agencies have stepped up efforts that will reduce future losses by billions of dollars.

In this century, major earthquakes in the United States have damaged or destroyed numerous buildings, bridges, and other structures. By monitoring how structures respond to earthquakes and applying the knowledge gained, scientists and engineers are improving the ability of structures to survive major earthquakes. Many lives and millions of dollars have already been saved by this ongoing research.