Publications

The Great Southern California ShakeOut was a week of special events featuring the largest earthquake drill in United States history. On November 13, 2008, over 5 million Southern Californians pretended that the magnitude-7.8 ShakeOut scenario earthquake was occurring and practiced actions derived from results of the ShakeOut Scenario, to reduce the impact of a real, San Andreas Fault...

Imbrian-aged basalt ponds, located on the floor of South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, are used to provide constraints on the composition and evolution of the far side lunar mantle. We use forward modeling of the Lunar Prospector Gamma Ray Spectrometer thorium data, to suggest that at least five different and distinct portions of the far side lunar mantle contain little or no thorium as of...

A detailed and accurate landslide inventory is an essential part of seismic landslide hazard analysis. An ideal inventory would cover the entire area affected by an earthquake and include all of the landslides that are possible to detect down to sizes of 1–5 m in length. The landslides must also be located accurately and mapped as polygons depicting their true shapes. Such mapped...

Rhyolite is the most viscous of liquid magmas, so it was surprising that on 2 May 2008 at Chaitén Volcano, located in Chile’s southern Andean volcanic zone, rhyolitic magma migrated from more than 5 km depth in less than 4 hours and erupted explosively with only two days of detected precursory seismic activity. The last major rhyolite eruption before that at Chaitén was the largest...

Analysis is made of the geomagnetic-activity aa index and its source K-index data from groups of ground-based observatories in Britain, and Australia, 1868.0–2009.0, solar cycles 11–23. The K data show persistent biases, especially for high (low) K-activity levels at British (Australian) observatories. From examination of multiple subsets of the K data we infer that the biases are not

We produce a 1-min time resolution storm-time disturbance index, the USGS Dst, called Dst8507-4SM. This index is based on minute resolution horizontal magnetic field intensity from low-latitude observatories in Honolulu, Kakioka, San Juan and Hermanus, for the years 1985–2007. The method used to produce the index uses a combination of time- and frequency-domain techniques, which more...

In the aftermath of the devastating magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami that struck the Tohoku region of Japan on March 11, attention quickly turned away from a much smaller, but also highly destructive earthquake that struck the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, just a few weeks earlier, on Feb. 22. Both events are stark reminders of human vulnerability to natural disasters and...

This DVD contains lidar-derived first-surface (FS) and bare-earth (BE) topography GIS datasets of a portion of the Potato Creek watershed in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River basin, Georgia. These datasets were acquired on February 27, 2010.

Video-based observations of wave runup, setup, and swash from 10 dynamically diverse field experiments are presented. These data were used to develop widely applicable empirical parameterizations for wave setup, incident band swash height, infragravity band swash height, and the 2-percent exceedance level for wave runup. Details regarding the experiments, data analysis, and empirical

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is investigating how the social networking site Twitter, a popular service for sending and receiving short, public text messages, can augment USGS earthquake response products and the delivery of hazard information. Rapid detection and qualitative assessment of shaking events are possible because people begin sending public Twitter messages (tweets) with...

With the advent of the USGS prompt assessment of global earthquakes for response (PAGER) system, which rapidly assesses earthquake impacts, U.S. and international earthquake responders are reconsidering their automatic alert and activation levels and response procedures. To help facilitate rapid and appropriate earthquake response, an Earthquake Impact Scale (EIS) is proposed on the...

Six large iron meteorites have been discovered in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity in a nearly 25 km-long traverse. Herein, we review and synthesize the available data to propose that the discovery and characteristics of the six meteorites could be explained as the result of their impact into a soft and wet surface, sometime during the...