Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Earthquake Science Center

The Earthquake Science Center has been the flagship research center of the USGS in the western United States for more than 50 years. It is the largest USGS research center in the West and houses extensive laboratories, scientific infrastructure, and research facilities.

News

Ozette Lake: A natural seismograph along the northern Cascadia Subduction Zone (Video)

Ozette Lake: A natural seismograph along the northern Cascadia Subduction Zone (Video)

Earthquake swarms in California: What’s the difference between magmatic and tectonic? 

Earthquake swarms in California: What’s the difference between magmatic and tectonic? 

Even small lakes can tell big earthquake stories in the Yellowstone region

Even small lakes can tell big earthquake stories in the Yellowstone region

Publications

The digital archivist: Automating legacy macroseismic data processing using large language models The digital archivist: Automating legacy macroseismic data processing using large language models

Macroseismic data are a key resource to investigate shaking and damage from preinstrumental and early instrumental eras. However, data are often stored as inconsistently formatted reports describing observed shaking and damage, making manually parsing and interpreting accounts labor‐intensive. We introduce a novel workflow using Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro large language model (LLM) to...
Authors
Aarnav Agrawal, Susan E. Hough, Mostafa Mousavi, Margaret Hellweg, William Ellsworth, Clara Yoon, Salvador Blanco

Cascadia Subduction Zone science: Call for the next generation community seismic velocity model Cascadia Subduction Zone science: Call for the next generation community seismic velocity model

The Cascadia subduction zone (CSZ) hosts major seismic and tsunami hazards, yet key questions persist about the relationship between margin structure, fluid distribution, episodic tremor and slip, shallow megathrust behavior, shaking and tsunamigenesis, and the resulting hazard estimates. Addressing these problems requires an empirically grounded, three‐dimensional seismic velocity model...
Authors
Valerie J. Sahakian, Asif Ashraf, Charity Mann, Pieter-Ewald Share-MacParland, Rasheed Ajala, Jonathan Delph, Bin He, Emilie Hooft, Alex R. Grant, William J. Stephenson, Erin A. Wirth, Amanda Thomas, Diego Melgar, Jill Elizabeth

A ground-motion model derived using a generalized mean rupture distance for large slab interface earthquakes A ground-motion model derived using a generalized mean rupture distance for large slab interface earthquakes

Source–station distance is a central input to ground‐motion models (GMMs) for predicting seismic shaking. GMM development uses distance metrics including the Joyner–Boore distance, which is the shortest distance from an observation point to the surface projection of the earthquake rupture, and Rrup the shortest distance to the rupture in three dimensions. Thompson and Baltay (2018)...
Authors
Jessica R. Murray, Grace Alexandra Parker
Was this page helpful?