Following the 1994 Northridge and 1995 Kobe earthquakes, most of modern structures damaged seriously or devastated totally despite the seismic codes of these countries that had been expected to bear advanced criteria for seismic design of structures. After extensive research, the most probable reason of those destructions was attributed to special specifications of near-field earthquakes. In th...

Although India has a long written record, the shaking intensity of few damaging earthquakes that occurred before AD 1800, can be quantified. Since reliable estimates of future shaking near planned nuclear power plants depend on the extrapolation of historical earthquake data spanning many centuries, estimates of seismic risk to the planned Jaitapur nuclear power plant assessed from a short data...

GPS seismology uses convential geodetic models to analyze GPS data at high sampling rates, such as 1 Hz. GPS seismology results are shown for the Denali, San Simeon, Tokachi-oki, and Chuetsu earthquakes. Records for these earthquakes indicate that GPS is an excellent instrument for measuring large displacements near earthquake ruptures. GPS systems can be improved for seismic applications if th...

This chapter focuses on the impacts of natural phenomena such as earthquakes and hurricanes or typhoons in terms of fatalities and injuries. In particular, it frames such impacts in the context of human insecurity. Through a comparison of outcomes associated to natural events in developed and developing countries, the document puts forth the notion that developed countries are finding ways to e...

5 [1] Modern earthquake catalogs are often described using spatial‐temporal point process 6 models such as the epidemic‐type aftershock sequence (ETAS) models of Ogata (1998). 7 Earthquake catalogs often have issues of incompleteness and other inaccuracies for 8 earthquakes of magnitude below a certain threshold, and such earthquakes are typically 9 removed prior to fitting a point process mode...

The occurrence of aftershocks is a signature of physical systems exhibiting relaxation phenomena. They are observed in various natural or experimental systems and usually obey several non-trivial empirical laws. Here we consider a cellular automaton realization of a nonlinear viscoelastic slider-block model in order to infer the physical mechanisms of triggering responsible for the occurrence o...

A multitude of systems ranging from the Barkhausen effect in ferromagnetic materials to plastic deformation and earthquakes respond to slow external driving by exhibiting intermittent, scale-free avalanche dynamics or crackling noise. The avalanches are power-law distributed in size, and have a typical average shape: these are the two most important signatures of avalanching systems. Here we sh...