Publications

Eight seismic stations were placed in a linear array with a topographic relief of 222 m over Mission Peak in the east San Francisco Bay region for a period of one year to study topographic effects. Seventy‐two well‐recorded local earthquakes are used to calculate spectral amplitude ratios relative to a reference site. A well‐defined fundamental resonance peak is observed with individual...

Strong‐motion recordings of the Mw 8.8 Maule earthquake were modeled using a compound rupture model consisting of (1) a background slip distribution with large correlation lengths, relatively low slip velocity, and long peak rise time of slip of about 10 s and (2) high stress‐drop subevents (asperities) on the deeper portion of the rupture with moment magnitudes 7.9–8.2, high slip...

Strainmeters measure elastodynamic deformation associated with earthquakes over a broad frequency band, with detection characteristics that complement traditional instrumentation, but they are commonly used to study slow transient deformation along active faults and at subduction zones, for example. Here, we analyze dynamic strains at Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) borehole...

Tidal triggering of earthquakes is hypothesized to provide quantitative information regarding the fault's stress state, poroelastic properties, and may be significant for our understanding of seismic hazard. To date, studies of regional or global earthquake catalogs have had only modest successes in identifying tidal triggering. We posit that the smallest events that may provide...

The ShakeCast system is an openly available, near real-time post-earthquake information management system. ShakeCast is widely used by public and private emergency planners and responders, lifeline utility operators and transportation engineers to automatically receive and process ShakeMap products for situational awareness, inspection priority, or damage assessment of their own...

Previous magnetotelluric (MT) studies of the high-temperature Coso geothermal system in California identified a subvertical feature of low resistivity (2–5 Ohm m) and appreciable lateral extent (>1 km) in the producing zone of the East Flank field. However, these models could not reproduce gross 3-D effects in the recorded data. We perform 3-D full-tensor inversion and retrieve a...

Earthquake ground‐motion recordings are scarce in the central and eastern United States (CEUS) for large‐magnitude events and at close distances. We use two different simulation approaches, a deterministic physics‐based method and a site‐based stochastic method, to simulate ground motions over a wide range of magnitudes. Drawing on previous results for the modeling of recordings from the...

Introduction This U.S. Geological Survey report presents laboratory analyses along with field notes for an exploratory study to document the relative abundance of noble gases in mineral springs and water wells within the Cascadia forearc of Washington, Oregon, and California (fig. 1). This report describes 14 samples collected in 2014 and 2015 and complements a previous report that...

In regions of low strain, long earthquake recurrence intervals (104–106  yrs) and erosive processes limit preservation of Quaternary markers suitable for distinguishing whether faults slip at uniform or secularly varying rates. The Lower Rhine graben in the border region of Germany, The Netherlands, and Belgium provides a unique opportunity to explore Quaternary slip‐rate variations in a...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has made significant progress toward the rapid estimation of shaking and shakingrelated losses through their Did You Feel It? (DYFI), ShakeMap, ShakeCast, and PAGER products. However, quantitative estimates of the extent and severity of secondary hazards (e.g., landsliding, liquefaction) are not currently included in scenarios and real-time post...

The 3 September 2016, Mw 5.8 Pawnee earthquake was the largest recorded earthquake in the state of Oklahoma. Seismic and geodetic observations of the Pawnee sequence, including precise hypocenter locations and moment tensor modeling, shows that the Pawnee earthquake occurred on a previously unknown left-lateral strike-slip basement fault that intersects the mapped right-lateral Labette...

This paper describes the tectonic summaries for all magnitude 7 and larger earthquakes in the period 2000–2015, as produced by the U.S. Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center during their routine response operations to global earthquakes. The goal of such summaries is to provide important event-specific information to the public rapidly and concisely, such that recent...