Understanding Past Earthquakes

2025
ISBN: 978-3-031-73579-0
Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland

Buch, Englisch, 227 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 522 g

This open access book presents the state of the art in research on the characteristics of past earthquakes. It presents an overview of contemporary developments, their use cases, and practical considerations, with the aim of introducing readers to recently developed methodologies as well as the sources, derivation, and handling of their uncertainties. The disparate fields of seismology, stratigraphy, geomorphology, and geodesy are all being applied to the common goal of understanding past earthquakes, and in this realm, each has experienced significant advances in the 2010s. The contents cover contemporary methods in remote sensing geomorphology, forensic pre-instrumental seismology, historic macroseismology, and paleogeodesy, some of which are already being employed together to derive a holistic picture of seismic events past. This book compiles in one resource the respective explanations of the diverse array of tools which are being used in the 2020s to investigate past seismic events to expand our seismic record.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gruetzner, Christoph

Elliott, Austin

Fachgebiete

• Geowissenschaften Geologie Geologie
• Geowissenschaften Geologie Bodenkunde, Sedimentologie
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Naturgewalten & Katastrophen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction.- Modern Approaches to Understanding Past Earthquakes.- Measuring Ground Motions.- Historical Instrumental Seismology.- Eyewitness Macroseismology.- Shaking Constraints from Geology and the Natural Landscape.- Measuring Ground Deformation.- Remote Sensing of Surface Terrestrial Rupture Length and Slip.- Paleogeodesy of Offshore Earthquakes from Coral Microatolls. - Submarine Rupture extents and Sizes from Seafloor Coring.- Synthesizing Observations of Individual Earthquakes.- Surface Rupture Geometries, Slip Variability & Scaling Relations from Multiple Earthquakes.- Extrapolating Paleoseismic Parameters to an Entire Fault.- Distribution of Deformation through the Earthquake Cycle.- Synoptic Conclusion.- Employing and Combining Diverse Approaches to Understand Past Earthquake Ruptures in Relation to Modern Seismic Events.

Über Autor(innen)

Dr. Austin Elliott is an earthquake geologist using observations of past and contemporary earthquakes to understand coseismic rupture processes and the behavior of faults and fault systems through the earthquake cycle. His research employs techniques from the domains of terrestrial paleoseismology and tectonic geomorphology as well as geodetic imaging of deformation from earthquakes and fault motion. Austin also has used historical seismology and eyewitness reporting of earthquake phenomena to refine the magnitudes and locations of past earthquakes. The inspiration for this book arose from the recognition of overlap and complementarity of these techniques and the need for practitioners including himself to be well versed in the plethora of ways that source parameters of past earthquakes can be determined, estimated, or constrained.

Dr. Christoph Grützner uses mainly paleoseismology and tectonic geomorphology to investigate active faults. He has worked in extensional settings, for example in Germany, Greece, and Peru, and in regions with predominantly reverse and strike-slip fault motion such as Central Asia and the European Alps. For many years, his main interest was on rather slowly slipping faults in the interior of the continents. From these studies Christoph realized that low slip rates and long earthquake recurrence intervals set limits to what can be achieved with classical paleoseismology. Complementary techniques are needed to gather a complete picture of the active tectonics of such regions. This was the motivation for this book.