Publications

To investigate the nature of earthquake‐magnitude distributions on faults, we compare the interevent variability of surface displacement at a point on a fault from a composite global data set of paleoseismic observations with the variability expected from two prevailing magnitude–frequency distributions: the truncated‐exponential model and the characteristic‐earthquake model. We use...

The occurrence of three earthquakes with moment magnitude (Mw) greater than 8.8 and six earthquakes larger than Mw 8.5, since 2004, has raised interest in the long-term global rate of great earthquakes. Past studies have focused on the analysis of earthquakes since 1900, which roughly marks the start of the instrumental era in seismology. Before this time, the catalog is less complete...

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is seismically retrofitting the water delivery system at San Andreas Lake, San Mateo County, California, where the reservoir intake system crosses the San Andreas Fault (SAF). The near-surface fault location and geometry are important considerations in the retrofit effort. Because the SAF trends through highly distorted Franciscan mélange and...

The Hosgri Fault Zone trends subparallel to the south-central California coast for 110 km from north of Point Estero to south of Purisima Point and forms the eastern margin of the present offshore Santa Maria Basin. Knowledge of the attributes of the Hosgri Fault Zone is important for petroleum development, seismic engineering, and environmental planning in the region. Because it lies...

Near‐vertical faults can be imaged using reflected refractions identified in controlled‐source seismic data. Often theses phases are observed on a few neighboring shot or receiver gathers, resulting in a low‐fold data set. Imaging can be carried out with Kirchhoff prestack depth migration in which migration noise is suppressed by constructive stacking of large amounts of multifold data...

The nucleation area of the series of M6 events in Parkfield has been shown to be characterized by low b-values throughout the seismic cycle. Since low b-values represent high differential stresses, the asperity structure seems to be always stably stressed and even unaffected by the latest main shock in 2004. However, because fault loading rates and applied shear stress vary with time...

The Mw9.0 Tohoku-oki Japan earthquake produced approximately 2,000 ground motion recordings. We consider 1,238 three-component accelerograms corrected with component-specific low-cut filters. The recordings have rupture distances between 44 km and 1,000 km, time-averaged shear wave velocities of VS30 = 90 m/s to 1,900 m/s, and usable response spectral periods of 0.01 sec to >10 sec. The...

Long Valley Caldera in eastern California is an active volcanic area and has shown continued unrest in the last three decades. We have monitored surface deformation from Global Positioning System (GPS) data by using a projection method that we call Targeted Projection Operator (TPO). TPO projects residual time series with secular rates and periodic terms removed onto a predefined spatial...

Modern global earthquake fatalities can be separated into two components: (1) fatalities from an approximately constant annual background rate that is independent of world population growth and (2) fatalities caused by earthquakes with large human death tolls, the frequency of which is dependent on world population. Earthquakes with death tolls greater than 100,000 (and 50,000) have...

The Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO), the geodetic component of the U.S. National Science Foundation–funded Earthscope program, includes 75 borehole and 6 laser strainmeters (http://pbo.unavco.org). The strainmeters are installed at several locations: on the Cascadia forearc in Washington state and on Vancouver Island, Canada; in arrays of two to nine instruments along the North American...

The Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta is an inland delta at the western extent of the Central Valley. Levees were built around swampy islands starting after the Civil War to reclaim these lands for farming. Various studies show that these levees could fail in concert from shaking from a major local or regional earthquake resulting in salty water from the San Francisco Bay contaminating the...

We find subdivisions within the Mojave Block using cluster analysis to identify groupings in the velocities observed at GPS stations there. The clusters are represented on a fault map by symbols located at the positions of the GPS stations, each symbol representing the cluster to which the velocity of that GPS station belongs. Fault systems that separate the clusters are readily...