Subduction earthquakes on plate-boundary megathrusts accommodate most of the global seismic moment release, frequently resulting in devastating damage by ground shaking and tsunamis. As many earthquakes occur in deep-sea regions, the dynamics of earthquake faulting in subduction zones is poorly understood. However, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Expe...

We investigate on the capability of the strongest earthquakes to modify significantly the seismicity in a wide spatio-temporal window. In particular, we show that the strongest earthquakes of last century were probably able to influence the seismicity at large spatio-temporal distances, extending their reach over thousand of kilometers and decades later. We report statistically significant diff...

We examine the association between earthquakes and Pc1 pulsations observed at a low-latitude station in Parkfield, California. The period under examination is∼7.5 years in total, from February 1999 to July 2006, and we use an automatic identification algorithm to extract information on Pc1 pulsations from the magnetometer data. These pulsations are then statistically correlated to earthquakes f...

Earthquake prediction is an area of research of great scientific and public fascination. The reason for this is not only that earthquakes can cause extremely large numbers of fatalities in a short time, but also because earthquakes can have a large social and economic impact on society. Earthquake prediction in the sense of making deterministic predictions about the place, time, and magnitude o...

[1] Acoustic emissions and tremor‐like signals are widely recorded in laboratory experiments. We are able to isolate the physical origins of these signals using high resolution nanoseismic analysis. The use of a picometer‐sensitive, wide‐band sensor array permits us to determine force‐time functions and focal mechanisms for discrete events found amid the “noise” of friction, similar to how low ...

The Region-Time-Length (RTL) algorithm has been applied to different instrumental catalogues to detect seismic quiescence before medium-to-large earthquakes in Italy in the last two decades. RTL performances are sensitive to the choice of spatial and temporal parameters. The method for automatic parameters selection developed by Chen and Wu has been applied to 12 Italian earthquakes with magnit...

Large magnitude earthquakes in urban environments continue to kill and injure tens to hundreds of thousands of people, inflicting lasting societal and economic disasters. Earthquake early warning (EEW) provides seconds to minutes of warning, allowing people to move to safe zones and automated slowdown and shutdown of transit and other machinery. The handful of EEW systems operating around the w...

For centuries and on every continent discrete shapes of lights with unusual motions have preceded earthquakes. The numbers of these lights per interval within a region have been strongly correlated with the amount of seismic energy subsequently released within that region. These temporal intervals range between 3 months and 6 months for areas more than 500 km in radius and less than a month for...

The 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake (MW=7.6; ML=7.3) ruptured in an area considered unusual in that, historically, large earthquakes have been unheard of and the background seismicity are low. A detailed investigation of the crustal characteristics based on seismicity, subsurface structures and GPS surveys shows that crustal strength in the low-seismicity block was most likely stronger than in the surr...

The observation of foreshocks preceding large earthquakes and the suggestion that foreshocks have specific properties that may be used to distinguish them from other earthquakes have raised the hope that large earthquakes may be predictable. Among proposed anomalous properties are the larger proportion than normal of large versus small foreshocks, the power law acceleration of seismicity rate a...