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The U.S. Geological Survey 2025 Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands time-independent earthquake rupture forecast

March 16, 2026

We present the 2025 U.S. Geological Survey Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands (PRVI) time‐independent earthquake rupture forecast (ERF), developed for the 2025 update to the National Seismic Hazard Model (NSHM) for PRVI. The updated ERF improves upon a prior model from 2003, including an expanded fault inventory with slip‐rate estimates, updated seismicity catalogs, and refined subduction zone geometries and deformation models. It applies the fault‐system inversion methodology to solve for rates of ruptures on modeled faults, adapted from the 2023 NSHM (NSHM23) for the western United States, including the first application of the inversion to model rates on a U.S. subduction interface. Off‐fault and intraslab seismicity are constrained by observed seismicity and use updated methods developed for NSHM23. Uncertainties in model components are substantial, and the ERF represents epistemic uncertainties through a comprehensive logic tree consisting of 1.7 billion logic‐tree branches combined across all sources.

Publication Year 2026
Title The U.S. Geological Survey 2025 Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands time-independent earthquake rupture forecast
DOI 10.1785/0120250040
Authors Kevin Ross Milner, Alexandra Elise Hatem, Richard W. Briggs, Jessica Ann Thompson Jobe, Andrea L. Llenos, Andrew J. Michael, Allison Shumway, Edward H. Field, Kirstie Lafon Haynie
Publication Type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Series Title Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America
Index ID 70274265
Record Source USGS Publications Warehouse
USGS Organization Geologic Hazards Science Center - Seismology / Geomagnetism
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