Publications

This study presents a quantitative and geospatial description of global losses due to earthquake-induced secondary effects, including landslide, liquefaction, tsunami, and fire for events during the past 40 years. These processes are of great importance to the US Geological Survey’s (USGS) Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response (PAGER) system, which is currently being...

A typhoon (Typhoon No. 10) attacked Shikoku Island and the Tyugoku area of Japan in 2004. This typhoon produced a new daily precipitation record of 1317 mm on Shikoku Island and triggered hundreds of landslides in Tokushima Prefecture. One catastrophic landslide was triggered in the Shiraishi area of Kisawa village, and destroyed more than 10 houses while also leaving an unstable block...

Because many tree species can live for several centuries or longer (Brown 1996), tree-ring analysis can be a valuable tool to date geomorphic events such as landslides, earthquakes, and avalanches in regions lacking long historical records. Typically, a catastrophic landslide will destroy all trees on the landslide, but trees on slower moving landslides may survive. For example, the...

No abstract available.

We demonstrate a direct method for the calculation of the annual frequency of exceedance for earthquake losses (or the probability distribution for annual losses) to a portfolio. This method parallels the classic method of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis for the calculation of the annual frequency of exceedance for earthquake ground motions. The method assumes conditional...

Maps of surficial geology, deterministic and probabilistic seismic hazard, and liquefaction potential index have been prepared by various members of the Evansville Area Earthquake Hazard Mapping Project for seven quadrangles in the Evansville, Indiana, and Henderson, Kentucky, metropolitan areas. The surficial geologic maps feature 23 types of surficial geologic deposits, artificial fill...

Most probabilistic seismic-hazard assessments require an estimate of Mmax, the magnitude (M) of the largest earthquake that is thought possible within a specified area. In seismically active areas such as some plate boundaries, large earthquakes occur frequently enough that Mmax might have been observed directly during the historical period. In less active regions like most of the...

The thirteenth biennial International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy (IAGA) Workshop on Geomagnetic Observatory Instruments, Data Acquisition and Processing was held in the United States for the first time on June 9-18, 2008. Hosted by the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) Geomagnetism Program, the workshop's measurement session was held at the Boulder Observatory and the...

Dendrogeomorphic techniques were used to assess soil movement within the Rattlesnake Gulf landslide in the Tully Valley of central New York during the last century. This landslide is a postglacial, slow-moving earth slide that covers 23 acres and consists primarily of rotated, laminated, glaciolacustrine silt and clay. Sixty-two increment cores were obtained from 30 hemlock (Tsuga...

This report presents an emergency assessment of potential debris-flow hazards from basins burned by the 2009 Station fire in Los Angeles County, southern California. Statistical-empirical models developed for postfire debris flows are used to estimate the probability and volume of debris-flow production from 678 drainage basins within the burned area and to generate maps of areas that...

No abstract available.

We combine newspaper accounts and Nuttli's (1976) isoseismal map to assign modified Mercalli intensity (MMI) at 76 towns for the May 16, 1909 Northern Plains earthquake. The earthquake was felt across more than 1,500,000 km2 in the States of Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming and the Provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, and Saskatchewan.