Publications

This memo lays out a procedure for the GEM software to offer an available vulnerability function for any acceptable set of attributes that the user specifies for a particular building category. The memo also provides general guidelines on how to submit the vulnerability or fragility functions to the GEM vulnerability repository, stipulating which attributes modelers must provide so that...

Wildfire is a worldwide phenomenon that is expected to increase in extent and severity in the future, due to fuel accumulations, shifting land management practices, and climate change. It immediately affects the landscape by removing vegetation, depositing ash, influencing water-repellent soil formation, and physically weathering boulders and bedrock. These changes typically lead to...

We find subdivisions within the Mojave Block using cluster analysis to identify groupings in the velocities observed at GPS stations there. The clusters are represented on a fault map by symbols located at the positions of the GPS stations, each symbol representing the cluster to which the velocity of that GPS station belongs. Fault systems that separate the clusters are readily...

Alaska’s national parks contain 11 historically active volcanoes (Figure 2), which produce thousands of small earthquakes every year. These earthquakes are voices of the magmatic and geothermal systems within the volcanoes. The Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO), a joint program of the U.S. Geological Survey, the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the Alaska...

The MW 7.0, 12 January 2010, Haiti earthquake triggered more than 7,000 landslides in the mountainous terrain south of Port-au-Prince over an area that extends approximately 50 km to the east and west from the epicenter and to the southern coast. Most of the triggered landslides were rock and soil slides from 25°–65° slopes within heavily fractured limestone and deeply weathered basalt...

We review the phenomenon of time-stationary, periodic quiet-time geomagnetic tides. These are generated by the ionospheric and oceanic dynamos, and, to a lesser-extent, by the quiet-time magnetosphere, and they are affected by currents induced in the Earth's electrically conducting interior. We examine historical time series of hourly magnetic-vector measurements made at the Honolulu...

Executive Summary The mission of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in natural hazards is to develop and apply hazard science to help protect the safety, security, and economic well-being of the Nation. The costs and consequences of natural hazards can be enormous, and each year more people and infrastructure are at risk. USGS scientific research—founded on detailed observations and...

We provide ground-motion prediction equations for computing medians and standard deviations of average horizontal component intensity measures (IMs) for shallow crustal earthquakes in active tectonic regions. The equations were derived from a global database with M 3.0–7.9 events. We derived equations for the primary M- and distance-dependence of the IMs after fixing the VS30-based...

The southern arm of the New Madrid seismic zone of the central United States coincides with the buried, ~110 km by ~20 km Blytheville Arch antiform within the Cambrian–Ordovician Reelfoot rift graben. The Blytheville Arch has been interpreted at various times as a compressive structure, an igneous intrusion, or a sediment diapir. Reprocessed industry seismic-reflection profiles presented...

We describe the modern distribution of salt-marsh and tidal-flat foraminifera from Sitkinak Island (Trinity Islands) and Simeonof Island (Shumagin Islands), Alaska, to begin development of a dataset for later use in reconstructing relative sea-level changes caused by great earthquakes along the Alaska-Aleutian subduction zone. Dead foraminifera were enumerated from a total of 58 surface...

We show that perchlorate hydrates, which have been detected at high circumpolar martian latitudes, have a dramatic effect upon the rheological behavior of polycrystalline water ice under conditions applicable to the North Polar Layered Deposits (NPLD). We conducted subsolidus creep tests on mixtures of ice and magnesium perchlorate hydrate, Mg(ClO4)2·6H2O (MP6), of 0.02, 0.05, 0.10, and...

This chapter summarizes the state-of-the-art for rapid earthquake impact estimation. It details the needs and challenges associated with quick estimation of earthquake losses following global earthquakes, and provides a brief literature review of various approaches that have been used in the past. With this background, the chapter introduces the operational earthquake loss estimation...