During an earthquake, structures are subjected to both horizontal and vertical shaking. Most structures are rather insensitive to variations in the vertical acceleration history and primary considerations are given to the impact of the horizontal shaking on the behavior of structures. In the laboratory, however, most component tests are carried out under uni-directional horizontal loading to si...

The main components which affect the earthquake damage grades classification of multistory masonry buildings and the damage characters are summarized and analyzed through the statistics and analysis of a large number of previous earthquake damage data. According to the standard of earthquake damage grades classification, the damage numbers of each component of multistory masonry buildings under...

Ground-motion prediction (attenuation) models predict the probability distributions of spectral acceleration values for a specified earthquake event. These models provide only marginal distributions, however; they do not specify correlations among spectral accelerations with differing periods or orientations. In this article a large number of strong ground motions are used to empirically estima...

A set of time-synchronized strong-motion accelerograms, obtained on the San Juan Bautista 156/101 Separation Bridge in California during the 6 August 1979 Coyote Lake earthquake (ML = 5.9), are used to study the spatial variation of ground motion at the bridge site, including traveling wave effects and the influence of multiple-support excitation. Analysis of the ground motion recorded at the b...

Shear-wave polarization analysis has been performed on data from twelve earthquakes recorded in central Italy. These data are part of a set of high quality seismograms recorded by a three-component digital network installed in Abruzzo region after a Ms = 5.8 earthquake on 7 May 1984. Analysis performed on 2 to 6 Hz bandpass-filtered seismograms reveals shear-wave splitting. In order to determin...

Tsunamis are often generated by a moving sea bottom. This paper deals with the case where the tsunami source is an earthquake. The linearized water-wave equations are solved analytically for various sea bottom motions. Numerical results based on the analytical solutions are shown for the free-surface profiles, the horizontal and vertical velocities as well as the bottom pressure.

The object of this paper is to provide a method of cost-benefit analysis of earthquake prediction as a means of mitigation of earthquake effects. The research in earthquake prediction may or may not be successful and involves an initial cost. Earthquake prediction, if achieved, on the one hand provides society with information which allows it to take protective measures. On the other hand, each...

We use three-dimensional dynamic (spontaneous) rupture models to investigate the nearly simultaneous ruptures of the Susitna Glacier thrust fault and the Denali strike-slip fault. With the 1957 Mw 8.3 Gobi-Altay, Mongolia, earthquake as the only other well-documented case of significant, nearly simultaneous rupture of both thrust and strike-slip faults, this feature of the 2002 Denali fault ear...

Coseismic displacements play a key role in understanding earthquake dynamics. To derive displacement fields from optical and microwave remote sensing datasets, various methods are available. This study evaluated in detail the offset tracking technique on optical ASTER data for 2005 Kashmir earthquake. This technique required input parameters like resampling methods, correlator types, window siz...