Slow earthquakes represent an important conundrum in earthquake physics. While regular earthquakes are catastrophic events with rupture velocities governed by elastic wave speed, the processes that underlie slow fault slip phenomena, including recent discoveries of tremor, slow-slip and low-frequency earthquakes, are less understood. Theoretical models and sparse laboratory observations have pr...

It has been recognized that even weakly coupled subduction zones may cause large interplate earthquakes leading to destructive tsunamis. The Ryukyu Trench is one of the best fields to study this phenomenon, since various slow earthquakes and tsunamis have occurred; yet the fault structure and seismic activity there are poorly constrained. Here we present seismological evidence from marine obser...

[1] The Kaoiki Seismic Zone at Mauna Loa’s east flank is the locus of some of the largest earthquakes on Hawaii. In this paper we examine the link of those earthquakes to volcanic activity at Mauna Loa. We calculate the changes of Coulomb failure stress along the Kaoiki faults for typical volcanic events at Mauna Loa volcano. We simulate the dislocation associated with the 1950 eruption at the ...

The recorded responses of an Anchorage, Alaska, building during four significant earthquakes that occurred in 2002 are studied. Two earthquakes, including the 3 November 2002 M7.9 Denali fault earthquake, with epicenters approximately 275 km from the building, generated long trains of longperiod (.1 s) surface waves. The other two smaller earthquakes occurred at subcrustal depths practically be...

[1] The ability to monitor transient motion along faults is critical to improving our ability to understand many natural phenomena such as landslides and earthquakes. Here, we usedata from a GPS and seismometer network that were deployed to monitor the regularly repeating glacial earthquakes of Whillans Ice Stream, West Antarctica to show that a unique pattern of precursory slip precedes comple...

The opinions expressed in this PWSRCAC commissioned report are not necessarily those of PWSRCAC. The 1964 earthquake demonstrated that the Valdez area is subject to enormous earthquakes and coeval tsunamis. The geologic record of prehistoric earthquakes and tsunamis in the Valdez area has not previously been studied. Historic and prehistoric paleotsunami deposits were identified during this stu...

Regional ground-motion generation and propagation must be characterized to adequately assess seismic hazard. In the Cascadia region of southwestern British Columbia and northwestern Washington, the ground-motion issues are particularly complex because of the contributions to hazard from five distinct types of events, all of which behave differently in terms of their ground-motion propagation ch...

We analyze the seismic moment-frequency relation in various depth ranges and for different seismic regions, using Flinn-Engdahl’s regionalization of global seismicity. Three earthquake lists of centroid-moment tensor data have been used: the Harvard catalog, the USGS catalog, and the HUANG et al. (1997) catalog of deep earthquakes. The results confirm the universality of the b-values and the ma...

The spatial distribution of seismicity is often used as one of the indicators of zones where future large earthquakes are likely to occur. This is particularly true for intraplate regions such as the central and eastern United States, where geology is markedly enigmatic for delineating seismically active areas. Although using past seismicity for this purpose may be intuitively appealing, it is ...

We determined the energy release in earthquakes using the data obtained from TriNet in southern California. We investigated the effects of the depth, the mechanism and the propagation path by examining the results for events with different mechanisms and depths. We found that the path and site effects dominate so much that these effects are not obvious. By far the most dominant is the path-site...