Publications

Macroseismology plays a crucial role in earthquake hazard and risk analyses, linking past earthquake occurrences and impacts with those of the present and future. The popularity of internet-based community contributions and the usefulness of intensities for communicating seismic hazards, early warning, and impacts to the public have all bolstered the use of macroseismology beyond its...

As the largest historical event in the eastern United States, the 1886 Charleston, South Carolina, earthquake, plays a prominent role in our nation’s seismological and human history and an outsized role in our probabilistic ground‐motion hazard estimates, affecting building codes, insurance rates, and geophysical monitoring. Thus, constraining the characteristics of the 1886 earthquake...

For many decades, it has been common practice to overlook the differences between response spectra and pseudo response spectra. This practice stems from analyses indicating that the average difference between response spectra and pseudo response spectra is negligible for a viscous damping ratio of 5%, which is near-universally adopted. As others have shown, the differences depend...

No abstract available.

Recent reports of decadal-scale structural changes in the lowermost mantle and transport of strong heterogeneity in the outer core may offer important insights into core-mantle structure and dynamics. These reports are derived from waveform comparisons of earthquake pairs or repeating earthquakes, particularly using differential travel-time measurements made with cross-correlation...

In the aftermath of a large earthquake, several practical constraints affect the systematic collection of data for assessing building damage. The available data are therefore typically incomplete, frequently missing key information such as the type of construction, age and geographic location. Moreover, the observations often favour certain locations and damage grades. In the absence of...

Cascading slope failures are increasing as glaciers retreat and slopes adjust to a warming climate, yet reconstructing their full dynamics from precursor to deposition remains challenging. Here we show that the 28 May 2025 Blatten rock-ice avalanche, which mobilized about 9.3 million cubic metres, can be reconstructed from seismic, geomorphological, and geotechnical evidence and...

Space weather poses an important but under-quantified threat to society. While severe geomagnetic storms are recognized as potential global catastrophes, their socio-economic impacts remain poorly quantified. We present a novel physics-engineering-economic framework that links geophysical drivers to power grid geoelectric fields, transformer vulnerability, and macroeconomic consequences...

Recent advances in Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis (PSHA) leverage physics‐based ground‐motion simulations to estimate seismic hazard, such as the CyberShake project. However, computational costs quickly escalate when performing PSHA for numerous faults or sites and can become prohibitively expensive. To reduce computational demands, CyberShake uses reciprocity and interpolates...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) uses an empirical model developed with logistic regression (the ‘M1’ model) to rapidly assess debris-flow likelihood and to identify quantitative rainfall thresholds for debris flows after wildfire in the western United States. The M1 model was calibrated to a debris-flow inventory from southern California (United States) and has been applied throughout...

No abstract available.

Landslides in deglaciating fjords pose a potential tsunami threat to nearby communities; however, processes contributing to long-term progressive rock damage and landslide conditioning remain poorly constrained in paraglacial settings. Here, we analyse the role of earthquake-induced rock mass damage over late Pleistocene to Holocene time scales, as a conditioning factor for modern...