Approximately 85% of Australia's population live along the coastal fringe, an area with high exposure to extreme inundations such as tsunamis. However, to date, no Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Assessments (PTHA) that include inundation have been published for Australia. This limits the development of appropriate risk reduction measures by decision and policy makers. We describe our PTHA underta...

Worldwide, more than one million earthquakes occur each year, an average of about two every minute (1). Research indicates a 60% probability that an earthquake of Richter magnitude 7.5 or greater will occur on the San Andreas fault in southern Cal-ifornia within the next 30 years, and a 50% probability that an earthquake of 7.0 or greater magnitude will occur on the San Andreas or Hayward fault...

Transient gravity changes are expected to occur at all distances during an earthquake rupture, even before the arrival of seismic waves. Here we report on the search of such a prompt gravity signal in data recorded by a superconducting gravimeter and broadband seismometers during the 2011 Mw 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake. During the earthquake rupture, a signal exceeding the background noise is obs...

Physical modeling of earthquake generation processes is essential to further our understanding of seismic hazard. However, the scale-dependent nature of earthquake rupture processes is further complicated by the heterogeneous nature of the crust. Despite significant advances in the understanding of earthquake generation processes, and the derivation of underlying physical laws, controversy rema...

Observations from past earthquakes, such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and the 1995 Hyogoken-Nanbu (Kobe) earthquake, have clearly demonstrated that compromising water supply systems after an earthquake not only impairs fire fighting capacity, but also disrupts residential, commercial, and industrial activities, and threatens the economic well-being, secu...

This paper presents a notification system to identify earthquakes from firsthand reports published on Twitter. Tweets from target regions in Australia and New Zealand are checked for earthquake keyword frequency bursts and then processed to identify evidence of an earthquake. The benefit of our earthquake detector is that it relies on evidence of firsthand ‘felt’ reports from Twitter, provides ...

The frictional resistance on a fault during slip controls earthquake dynamics. Friction dissipates heat during an earthquake; therefore, the fault temperature after an earthquake provides insight into the level of friction. The Japan Trench Fast Drilling Project (Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 343 and 343T) installed a borehole temperature observatory 16 months after the March 201...

This paper briefly reviews the development of earthquake resistant design of buildings. The state-of-the-art of seismic design is discussed from the viewpoint of the performance criteria of buildings. These are (a) serviceability from frequent minor-intensity earthquake motions, (b) repairability from an infrequent but major-intensity earthquake motion, and (c) life safety from the maximum poss...