Publications

Nonlinear response history analysis (RHA) is now increasingly used for performance-based seismic design of tall buildings. Required for nonlinear RHAs is a set of ground motions selected and scaled appropriately so that analysis results would be accurate (unbiased) and efficient (having relatively small dispersion). This paper evaluates accuracy and efficiency of recently developed modal...

Sediments of the Wilson Creek Formation surrounding Mono Lake preserve a high-resolution archive of glacial and pluvial responses along the eastern Sierra Nevada due to late Pleistocene climate change. An absolute chronology for the Wilson Creek stratigraphy is critical for correlating the paleoclimate record to other archives in the western U.S. and the North Atlantic region. However...

The eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 produced a debris avalanche that flowed down the upper reaches of the North Fork Toutle River in southwestern Washington, clogging this drainage with sediment. In response to continuous anomalously high sediment flux into the Toutle and Cowlitz Rivers resulting from this avalanche and associated debris flows, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers...

A morphological monitoring program has documented the placement and initial dispersal of beach nourishment material (280,000 m3) placed between the Mouth of the Columbia River (MCR) North Jetty and North Head, at the southern end of the Long Beach Peninsula in southwestern Washington State. A total of 21 topographic surveys and 8 nearshore bathymetric surveys were performed between July...

The purpose of this map is to show the location of and evidence for recent movement on active fault traces within the Berryessa section and parts of adjacent sections of the Green Valley Fault Zone, California. The location and recency of the mapped traces is primarily based on geomorphic expression of the fault as interpreted from large-scale 2010 aerial photography and from 2007 and...

At 0546 U.t.c. March 11, 2011, a Mw 9.0 ("great") earthquake occurred near the northeast coast of Honshu Island, Japan, generating a large tsunami that devastated the east coast of Japan and impacted many far-flung coastal sites around the Pacific Basin. After the earthquake, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a tsunami alert for the State of Hawaii, followed by a tsunami-warning...

Planetary Data: A Workshop for Users and Software Developers 2012; Flagstaff, Ariz., 25–29 June 2012 The recent boom in the volume of data returned by planetary science missions continues to delight and confound users. Recently the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS) has seen an approximately 50‐fold increase in the amount of archived data and now serves nearly half a petabyte. Within 5...

The Yakima Folds (YF) comprise anticlines above reverse faults cutting flows of the Miocene Columbia River Basalt Group of central Washington State. The YF are bisected by the ~1100-km-long Olympic-Wallowa Lineament (OWL), which is an alignment of topographic features including known faults. There is considerable debate about the origin and earthquake potential of both the YF and OWL...

The purpose of this work was to use satellite-based thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing data to measure, map, and monitor geothermal activity within the Yellowstone geothermal area to help meet the missions of both the U.S. Geological Survey Yellowstone Volcano Observatory and the Yellowstone National Park Geology Program. Specifically, the goals were to: 1) address the challenges of...

Mount Katmai has long been recognized for its caldera collapse during the great pyroclastic eruption of 1912 (which vented 10 km away at Novarupta in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes), but little has previously been reported about the geology of the remote ice-clad stratovolcano itself. Over several seasons, we reconnoitered all parts of the edifice and sampled most of the lava flows...

The low-latitude regions of the Earth are undergoing profound, rapid landscape change as forests are converted to agriculture to support growing population. Understanding the effects of these land-use changes requires analysis of watershed-scale geomorphic processes to better inform and manage this usually disorganized process. The investigation of hillslope erosion and the development...

In order to understand earthquake hazards we would ideally have a statistical description of earthquakes for tens of thousands of years. Unfortunately the ∼100‐year instrumental, several 100‐year historical, and few 1000‐year paleoseismological records are woefully inadequate to provide a statistically significant record. Physics‐based earthquake simulators can generate arbitrarily long...