The 2011 Tohoku megathrust earthquake had an unexpected size for the region. To image the earthquake rupture in detail, we applied a novel backprojection technique to waveforms from local accelerometer networks. The earthquake began as a small-size twin rupture, slowly propagating mainly updip and triggering the break of a larger-size asperity at shallower depths, resulting in up to 50 m slip a...

This article is the first of a pair of articles that estimate regional and local strong motions from the 1923 Kanto, Japan, earthquake. This Ms 8.2 earthquake caused the most devastating damage in the metropolitan area in Tokyo history. In this article, we first calibrate wave propagation path effects with a moderate-sized modern event. This event, the Odawara earthquake of 5 August 1990 (M 5.1...

[1] A period parameter tc and an amplitude parameter Pd determined from the very beginning of P wave are important for earthquake early warning (EEW), yet their dependence on source mechanism, focal depth and epicentral distance has not been fully studied. After the devastating Mw7.9 Wenchuan earthquake, hundreds of M4-6 earthquakes occurred with diverse focal mechanisms and depth range of 2–20...

We have discovered nonvolcanic tremor activity (i.e., long-duration seismic signals with no clear P or S waves) within a transform plate boundary zone along the San Andreas Fault near Cholame, California, the inferred epicentral region of the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake (moment magnitude approximately 7.8). The tremors occur between 20 to 40 kilometers' depth, below the seismogenic zone (the upp...

A rectangular (4 by 5) array of short-period three-component seismometers with 15-m spacing was deployed to record several U.S. Geological Survey calibration explosions detonated around the Santa Cruz Mountains. The array was located at a site where an earlier station had recorded frequency-dependent polarized site resonances for aftershocks of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The site is on a ...

Over 2000 earthquakes happen every year in Japan, so that this country is often called earthquake-ridden (Government of Japan, 2006). There exists a serious problem to prevent the occurrence of earthquake-induced disasters, such as fire, short-circuits, gas leakage, etc. With the recent advent of nation-wide telecommunication networks, real-time earthquake information can be received at every h...

SMIP94 Seminar Proceedings Abutment stiffnesses are determined directly from the earthquake motions recorded at the US 1011 Painter Street Overpass using a simple equilibrium-based approach without finite-element modeling of the structure or the abutment-soil systems. The calculated abutment stiffnesses, which include the effects of soil-structure interaction and nonlinear behavior of the soil,...

The Mw 7.9 Denali fault earthquake in central Alaska of 3 November 2002 triggered earthquakes across western North America at epicentral distances of up to at least 3660 km. We describe the spatial and temporal development of triggered activity in California and the Pacific Northwest, focusing on Mount Rainier, the Geysers geothermal field, the Long Valley caldera, and the Coso geothermal field...

Design spectrum is known as an essential tool in earthquake engineering for calculation of maximum (design) responses in a structural system. Soil-structure interaction (SSI), as a phenomenon of coupling of responses of a structure and its underlying soil, was explored after introduction of design spectra and has not been taken into account in developing a design spectrum traditionally. To cons...