The Regional Earthquake Likelihood Models (RELM) project aims to produce and evaluate alternate models of earthquake potential (probability per unit volume, magnitude, and time) for California. Based on differing assumptions, these models are produced both to test the validity of their assumptions and explore which models should be incorporated in seismic hazard and risk evaluation. Tests based...

Monitoring of earthquake faults and volcanoes contributes to our understanding of their dynamic mechanisms and to our ability to predict future earthquakes and volcanic activity. We report here on spatial and temporal variations of seismic velocity around the seismogenic fault of the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake [moment magnitude (Mw) 7.0] based on ambient seismic noise. Seismic velocity near the r...

Continued use of magnitude-area scaling to estimate earthquake sizes is recommended. Area based on along-strike length and downdip width remains a good measure. Although questions have been raised concerning the depth extent of ruptures during large earthquakes, the seismogenic area remains a useful proxy for the purposes of estimating earthquake sizes. Four relations are examined here in terms...

On March 11, 2011, an 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck the northeast coast of Japan. Even more devastating was the tsunami that followed the earthquake. Thousands of homes were destroyed, and numerous forms of social infrastructure, such as roads and dams, were destroyed. The death toll exceeded 86,000, more than 13,000 were listed as missing, and 550,000 people had to evacuate the region. The s...

The Himalayan arc produced the largest known continental earthquake, the Mw≈ 8.7 Assam earthquake of 1950, but how frequently and where else in the Himalaya such large-magnitude earthquakes occur is not known. Paleoseismic evidence for coseismic ruptures at the front of the Himalaya with 15 to 30m of slip suggests even larger events in medieval times, but this inference is debated. Here we esti...

A Bayesian statistics approach is applied in the seismogenic sources of Greece and the surrounding area in order to assess seismic hazard, assuming that the earthquake occurrence follows the Poisson process. The Bayesian approach applied supplies the probability that a certain cut-off magnitude of Ms = 6.0 will be exceeded in time intervals of 10, 20 and 75 years. We also produced graphs which ...

although there is enough knowledge indicating on the influence of frequency content of input motion on the deformation demand of structures, state-of-the-practice seismic studies use the intensity measures such as peak ground acceleration (pga) which are not frequency dependent. the v max/a max ratio of strong ground motions can be used in seismic hazard studies as the representative of frequen...

On May 12, 2008, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake occurred in Wenchuan, Sichuan Province. In this disaster, 69,000 people were killed, 18,000 people were reported missing, and 37,000 people were injured, including more than 10,000 who were seriously injured. Trauma was the most commonly observed type of injury, with fractures accounting for 74% of all injury cases. On April 14, 2010, a 7.1-magnitude...

Natural time chi enables the distinction of two origins of self-similarity, i.e., the process memory and the process increments infinite variance. Employing multiplicative cascades in natural time, the most probable value of the variance kappa(1)(is identical to chi(2)-chi(2))is explicitly related with the parameter b of the Gutenberg-Richter law of randomly shuffled earthquake data. Moreover, ...

Sungun Copper Mine is located in an area with a high level of seismic hazard. Most recently, the Ahar-Varzeqan earthquake with a magnitude of 6.2 on Richter scale occurred on August 11, 2012; at a distance about 40 kilometers away from the mine. Nevertheless, the seismic stability of the final pit wall has not been comprehensively reviewed. In this research, the southwestern wall of the final p...