Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences,
University of Wisconsin - Green BayFirst-time Visitors: Please visit
Site Map and Disclaimer. Use "Back" to return here.
Some Important Earthquakes
- 1755 - Lisbon, Portugal
- Killed 70,000, Raised Waves in Lakes all over Europe
- First Scientifically Studied Earthquake
- 1811-1812 - New Madrid, Missouri
- Felt over 2/3 of the U.S.
- Few Casualties
- 1886 - Charleston, South Carolina
- Felt All over East Coast, Killed Several Hundred.
- First Widely-known U.S. Earthquake
- 1906 - San Francisco
- Killed 500 (later studies, possibly 2,500)
- First Revealed Importance of Faults
- 1923 - Tokyo
- 1964 - Alaska
- Killed about 200
- Wrecked Anchorage.
- Tsunamis on West Coast.
- 1976 - Tangshan, China
- Hit an Urban Area of Ten Million People
- Killed 650,000
Greatest Earthquakes and Volcanic Eruptions
What Causes Earthquakes?
Most Quakes Occur along
Faults (Fractures in Earth's Crust)
Elastic Rebound Theory
 | Here we have a landscape with a road, a fence, and a line of trees crossing a fault. As the crust moves, the rocks adjacent to the fault are deformed out of shape (in reality the deformation is spread across many kilometers - if it were this obvious, earthquake prediction would be easy).
Eventually the rocks are so stretched out of shape that they cannot bear the stress any longer. The fault slips, and the stage is set for the next cycle of strain buildup and release. |
Epicenter and Focus
- Focus
- Location within the earth where fault rupture actually occurs
- Epicenter
- Location on the surface above the focus
Types of Faults
Faults Are Classified on the Basis of the Kind of Motion That Occurs on Them
- Joints - No Movement
- Strike-Slip - Horizontal Motion (Wrench Faults)
- Left-Lateral
- Right-Lateral
- (San Andreas - 21 Ft. in 1906)
- Dip-Slip - Vertical Motion
- Normal (Extension)
- Reverse or Thrust (Compression)
- (San Fernando, 1971
- Alaska, 1964 - up to 150 Ft.)
- Nappe
- Overthrust
Fault Structures - Normal Faults
 | - Horst (uplifted block)
- Graben (or rift valley - downdropped block)
- Tilted Fault Block |
Fault Structures - Reverse Faults
Nappes or Overthrusts are shallowly-dipping thrust faults found in almost all mountain ranges. Because they are nearly horizontal, they often have very complex outcrop patterns.
 | A Window (W) is an opening where erosion cuts through a shallowly-dipping thrust fault to expose the rocks below. A klippe (K) is an isolated remnant of a thrust fault block. |
Major Hazards of Earthquakes
- Building Collapse
- Landslides
- Fire
- Tsunamis (Not Tidal Waves!)
Safest & Most Dangerous Buildings
- Small, Wood-frame House - Safest
- Steel-Frame
- Reinforced Concrete
- Unreinforced Masonry
- Adobe - Most Dangerous
Tsunamis
- Caused Probably by Submarine Landslides
- Travel about 400 M.p.h.
- Pass Unnoticed at Sea Cause Damage on Shore
- Warning Network Around Pacific Can Forecast Arrival
- Whether or Not Damage Occurs Depends on
- Direction of Travel
- Harbor Shape
- Bottom
- Tide & Weather
Seismology
Ideally, we'd like to be able to hover above the earth during and earthquake and watch the earth move beneath us. Since my anti-gravity belt is in the shop for repairs, the closest we can come is with a pendulum.
 | Contrary to intuition, an earthquake does not make the pendulum swing. Instead, the pendulum remains fixed as the ground moves beneath it.
A pendulum with a short period (left) moves along with the support and registers no motion. A pendulum with a long period (right) tends to remain in place while the support moves.
The boundary between the two types of behavior is the natural period of the pendulum. Only motions faster than the natural period will be detected; any motion slower will not. |
Since earthquake vibrations can have periods of many seconds, we need a pendulum with a very long period. We can construct a pendulum with a very long arm, or we can build a compact instrument by building a horizontal pendulum. If the pendulum is built like a swinging gate, the restoring force (force pulling it back toward the center of its swing) can be made very weak, and the pendulum can have a period as long as we like.
Seismic Waves
Seismic waves come in several types as shown below:
- P-Waves
- Primary (they arrive first), Pressure, or Push-Pull. Material expands and contracts in volume and particles move back and forth in the path of the wave. P-waves are essentially sound waves and travel through solids, liquids or gases. Ships at sea off the California coast in 1906 felt the earthquake when the P-wave traveled through the water and struck the ship (generally the crews thought they had struck a sandbar).
- S-Waves
- Secondary (arrive later), Shear, or Side-to-side. Material does not change volume but shears out of shape and snaps back. Particle motion is at right angles to the path of the wave. Since the material has to be able to "remember" its shape, S-waves travel only through solids.
- Surface Waves
- Several types, travel along the earth's surface or on layer boundaries in the earth. The slowest waves but the ones that do the damage in large earthquakes.
Magnitude and Intensity
Intensity
How Strong Earthquake Feels to Observer
- Depends On:
- Distance to Quake
- Geology
- Type of Building
- Observer!
- Varies from Place to Place
- Mercalli Scale- 1 to 12
We can plot earthquake intensity by gathering reports from observers. Although the reports will be subjective, and vary somewhat, most observers will agree on the intensity criteria, for example, feeling the quake while driving. For very strong quakes, damage provides fairly objective measures of intensity.
Isoseismals from the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake
 | Overall, the pattern is pretty simple: high intensity close to the San Andreas Fault, dropping off with distance. But why is there a disconnected island of high intensity in central California?
The band of low (IV) intensity parallel to the coast coincides with the Coast Ranges. Soils here are very shallow - usually less than a meter to bedrock. Observers here felt mostly a sharp jolt.
In contrast, the high intensity in central California coincides with the Central Valley, where young and unconsolidated sediments are kilometers deep. Unconsolidated material shakes like jelly in an earthquake.
Note how intensity VI follows the shoreline of San Francisco Bay, where there are also thick unconsolidated sediments. |
Intensity and Geology in San Francisco
At left is an isoseismal map for San Francisco itself . Everything was shaken hard, and of course intensities were extremely high close to the fault. But note how in the city intensity can vary by two levels within a couple of hundred meters. At right is a geologic map. Note that low intensity correlates closely with bedrock at or near the surface (Franciscan metamorphic rocks and serpentine).
 |  |
When we examine intensity compared to depth to bedrock (right) the pattern becomes even clearer. Candlestick Park, where game 3 of the 1989 World Series was about to begin, owes its reputation for being a windy ball park to being near a steep hill. Its location on bedrock meant that fans felt a sharp jolt, there were a few cracks in the concrete, and little else. (The First Amendment gives San Francisco the right to call it 3-Com Park if they like - it also gives me the right to ignore them.) The Marina District was shaken badly because it's on artificial fill, in fact, much of it is rubble from the 1906 earthquake. The deep filled valley in northeastern San Francisco is occupied by the commercial center of the city but the modern construction is steel-frame and was undamaged in the 1989 earthquake.
San Francisco and New Madrid Compared
 | The map at left compares the isoseismals from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the 1811-1812 New Madrid quakes.
There is a lot less intensity data for the New Madrid events so local details are missing. Intensity estimates are based on reports from places shown as blue dots. |
Although the New Madrid events were big, they owe their vast felt areas to the layer-cake geology of the Midwest. The flat strata and relative lack of geologic complexity (especially compared to California) mean that seismic waves travel very efficiently for long distances with little loss of energy.
Magnitude - Determined from Seismic Records
Richter Scale:
- Related to Energy Release
- Exponential
- Magnitude-Energy Relation
- 4 - 1
- 5 - 30
- 6 - 900
- 1 Megaton = about 7.0
- 7 - 27,000
- 8 - 810,000
- No Upper or Lower Bounds
- Largest Quakes about Mag. 8.7
A Seismograph Measures Ground Motion at One Instant
But --
- A Really Great Earthquake Lasts Minutes
- Releases Energy over Hundreds of Kilometers
- Need to Sum Energy of Entire Record
Seismic - Moment Magnitude
- Modifies Richter Scale, doesn't replace it
- Adds about 1 Mag. To 8+ Quakes
Magnitude and Energy
 | Magnitude and energy for large earthquakes. Near-surface earthquakes are measured in terms of their surface waves, but deep earthquakes don't produce much surface waves.
Deep earthquakes are measured in terms of their P- and S- waves. The two scales are defined to coincide as well as possible for normal deep earthquakes. |
 | There are not too many familiar analogies for very large earthquakes, but very small events overlap the energies of many familiar phenomena. |
Strategies of Earthquake Prediction
- Lengthen Historical Data Base
- Historical Records
- Paleoseismology
- Short-term Prediction
- Long-term Prediction
Eastern North America Earthquakes 1534-1994
Source: USGS Data
U.S. Earthquakes, 1973-2002
Source, USGS. 28,332 events. Purple dots are earthquakes below 50 km, the green dot is below 100.
Seismic Risk Level Maps for the U.S.
Probable ground acceleration in 50 years. Blue = small, red = large
Probability of damage in 100 years. Blue = negligible, green = low, red = high.
Seismic Gaps
- Modelling
- Dilatancy - Diffusion: cracks open as rocks deform. and fluids moving into the cracks weaken the rock, hastening its failure.
- Stick - Slip: studies of how and why materials slip.
- Asperities: sticking points on faults, typically bends. Many fault ruptures seem to be bounded by bends or kinks in the faults. Allows estimates of the likely magnitude of earthquakes along fault segments.
- Crack Propagation: studies of how cracks form, expand, and join.
Are Earthquakes Getting More Frequent?
It was only in 1885 that a seismograph in Europe detected an earthquake in Japan, and we have global coverage, even for very large events, only since 1900 or so. Below is a graph, based on USGS data, for the annual number of M=7.5 and M=8 earthquakes from 1900 to 2001.
The high levels between 1900 and 1918 were real. The instruments might have overrated some events, but also it is still possible that some events were missed in those years.
There was a steady decline between 1968 and 1984. Curiously, not a single person during those years asked me whether earthquakes were becoming
less frequent.
The graph above shows earthquake fatalities since 1800 from the U.S. Geological Survey list of significant earthquakes. The totals are not exact for any year but give an idea of trends. For example, the database for 1892 lists only two fatalities. Does anyone really believe there were only two earthquake fatalities worldwide in 1892, let alone the gaps where there are no reported fatalities?
Note that the scale is logarithmic. The dozen or so events with more than 100,000 fatalities account for a large fraction of the total. Even in recent decades there have been quiet years with only a few hundred fatalities. There have been about 4.5 million earthquake fatalities since 1900, 6 million since 1800, and 10.5 million since 1500.
There is an overall increasing trend, partly due to better reporting, partly due to larger populations in at-risk areas, and population pressures forcing people into ever more dangerous ground. However, some seismologists believe we have not seen the worst. World population has tripled since 1950 and that is too short a time for us to conclude we have seen the worst case scenarios. A repeat of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake at the worst possible time, or a tsunami like 2004 but directed north toward Bangladesh, could conceivably produce disasters with million-plus fatalities.
Seismology and Earth's Interior
Successive Approximation in Action
Assume the Earth is uniform. We know it isn't, but it's a useful place to start. It's a simple matter to predict when a seismic signal will travel any given distance.
Actual seismic signals don't match the predictions
- If we match the arrival times of nearby signals, distant signals arrive too soon
- If we match the arrival times of distant signals, nearby signals arrive too late.
- Signals are interrupted beyond about 109 degrees
We conclude:
- Distant signals travel through deeper parts of the Earth, therefore ..
- Seismic waves travel faster through deeper parts of the Earth, and ..
- They travel curving paths (refract)
- Also, there is an obstacle in the center (the core).
Wave Refraction
When marchers in a parade turn a corner, the inner marchers slow down and the outer ones speed up. When waves of any kind change speed, they also change direction (refract).
Refracted waves always travel the shortest possible path in terms of time. Path B is the fastest one possible.
Path A covers a shorter distance, but the slower velocity more than cancels out the savings in distance.
However, if a little is good, a lot is not necessarily better. Path C dips down into a region of even higher velocity than B, but the velocity is not fast enough to make up for the longer path length.
Seismic Waves in Earth's Interior
There are two ways to look at waves. One is to track
ray paths, the path of any particular impulse. The other way is to track
wave fronts, the boundary of the wave as it travels outward. A surfer riding a wave travels a ray path. The crest of the wave is the wave front. The animation below shows ray paths of a P-wave in the earth.
The animation below shows the wave front of a P-wave in the earth.
Inner Structure of the Earth
Seismic signals can bounce off boundaries in the Earth. Each leg of a signal describes its history up to that point. A P-wave travelling through the outer core is labelled K, a bounce off the core is denoted by lower-case c. We don't see any S-waves passing through the core, the principal line of evidence that the outer core is fluid.
A P-wave in the inner core is I and an S-wave in the inner core (remember, it's solid!) is J. There are so many variables to match, that by the time we successfully account for all the observed seismic signals, we can be pretty confident it is
the correct solution.
 | The overall structure of the Earth. |
Seismic tomography is a method of using seismic signals to map the earth's interior in three dimensions.
Return to 296-202 Visuals IndexReturn to Professor Dutch's home pageCreated 15 Jan 1997; Last Update 02 March 2010 Not an official UW-Green Bay site
