The Mw7.8 Kunlun earthquake of 14 November, 2001, in the northern Tibetan Plateau of China, was the largest event in the Chinese continental area in the latest 50 years. In this paper, layered visco-elastic models are calculated using the PSGRN/ PSCMP code, and the results are fi tted to the observed post-seismic deformation. We show that a model of a surface anelastic layer of 10km thickness o...

This paper selectively reviews physical models of earthquake instability. In these models, instability arises as a result of interaction of a fault constitutive relation with deformation of the surrounding material that occurs in response to remote tectonic loading. In contrast to kinematic models in which the fault slip is imposed, it is calculated in physical models and, consequently, these m...

The ~30-km-long surface ruptures associated with the Mw 7.0 (Mj 7.3) earthquake at 01:25 JST on April 16 in Kumamoto Prefecture appeared along the previously mapped ~100-km-long active fault called the Futagawa-Hinagu fault zone (FHFZ). The surface ruptures appeared to have extended further west out of the main FHFZ into the Kumamoto Plain. Although InSAR analysis by Geospatial Information Auth...

To assess whether recent seismicity is induced by human activity or is of natural origin, we analyze fault displacements on high-resolution seismic reflection profiles for two regions in the central United States (CUS): the Fort Worth Basin (FWB) of Texas and the northern Mississippi embayment (NME). Since 2009, earthquake activity in the CUS has increased markedly, and numerous publications su...

Earth orientation parameters (EOPs) provide a link between the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) and the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF). Natural geodynamic processes, such as earthquakes, can cause the motion of stations to become discontinuous and/or non-linear, thereby corrupting the EOP estimates if the sites are assumed to move linearly. The VLBI antenna at th...

Low-frequency spectra for the 1989 Macquarie Ridge earthquake (magnitude 8.2) show an amplitude increase and a phase-delay decrease below 6 millihertz that require a short-term slow precursor. This earthquake can be modeled as a compound event in which a fast-rupturing, ordinary earthquake was initiated by an episode of slow, smooth deformation that began more than 100 seconds before the main s...

Initially, the devastating Mw 7.0, 12 January 2010 Haiti earthquake seemed to involve straightforward accommodation of oblique relative motion between the Caribbean and North American plates along the Enriquillo–Plantain Garden fault zone. Here, we combine seismological observations, geologic field data and space geodetic measurements to show that, instead, the rupture process involved slip on ...

The evaluation of liquefaction effect on the dynamic moment of stabilizing piles is potentially significant. Based on the dynamic centrifuge modeling of a slope reinforced with a row of copper model pile, this paper not only analyzed the response of dynamic pore pressure, earthquake deformation and macroscopic phenomenon measured in the response of the reinforced slope, but also simulated the r...

The extended finite element method (XFEM) provides a natural way to incorporate strong and weak discontinuities into discretizations. It alleviates the need to mesh discontinuities, allowing simulation meshes to be nearly independent of discontinuity geometry. Currently, both quasistatic deformation and dynamic earthquake rupture simulations under standard FEM are limited to simplified fault ne...