Earthquakes are broad-banded vibratory ground motions, resulting from a number of causes including tectonic ground motions, volcanism, landslides, rockbursts, and man-made explosions. Of these, naturally occurring tectonic-related earthquakes are the largest and most important. These are caused by the fracture and sliding of rock along faults within the Earth’s crust. A fault is a zone of the earth’s crust within which the two sides have moved — faults may be hundreds of miles long, from one to over one hundred miles deep, and are sometimes not readily apparent on the ground surface.
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| Global Seismicity |
Earthquakes initiate a number of phenomena or agents, termed seismic hazards, which can cause significant damage to the built environment — these include fault rupture, vibratory ground motion (i.e., shaking), inundation (e.g., tsunami, seiche, dam failure), various kinds of permanent ground failure (e.g., liquefaction), fire, or hazardous materials release. In a particular earthquake event, any particular hazard can dominate, and historically each has caused major damage and great loss of life in particular earthquakes.
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| Global Tectonic Plate Boundaries |
For most earthquakes, shaking is the dominant and most widespread agent of damage. Shaking near the actual earthquake rupture lasts only during the time when the fault ruptures, a process that takes seconds or at most a few minutes. The seismic waves generated by the rupture propagate long after the movement on the fault has stopped, however, spanning the globe in about 20 min. Typically, earthquake ground motions are powerful enough to cause damage only in the near field (i.e., within a few tens of kilometers from the causative fault) — in a few instances, long period motions have caused significant damage at great distances, to selected lightly damped structures. A prime example of this was the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake, where numerous collapses of mid- and high-rise buildings were due to a magnitude 8.1 Earthquake occurring at a distance of approximately 400 km from Mexico City.
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| Types of Faults |
Causes of Earthquakes and Faulting In a global sense, tectonic earthquakes result from motion between a number of large plates comprising the earth’s crust or lithosphere (about 15 large plates, in total).These plates are driven by the convective motion of the material in the earth’s mantle, which in turn is driven by the heat generated at the earth’s core. Relative plate motion at the fault interface is constrained by friction and/or asperities (areas of interlocking due to protrusions in the fault surfaces). However, strain energy accumulates in the plates, eventually overcomes any resistance, and causes slip between the two sides of the fault. This sudden slip, termed elastic rebound by Reid (1910) based on his studies of regional deformation following the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, releases large amounts of energy, which constitutes or is the earthquake. The location of initial radiation of seismic waves (i.e., the first location of dynamic rupture) is termed the hypocenter, while the projection on the surface of the earth directly above the hypocenter is termed the epicenter. Other terminology includes near-field1 (within one source dimension of the epicenter, where source dimension refers to the width or length of faulting, whichever is shorter), far-field (beyond near-field), and meizoseismal (the area of strong shaking and damage). Energy is radiated over a broad spectrum of frequencies through the earth, in body waves and surface waves (Bolt 1993). Body waves are of two types: P waves (transmitting energy via push–pull motion) and slower S waves (transmitting energy via shear action at right angles to the direction of motion). Surface waves are also of two types: horizontally oscillating Love waves (analogous to S body waves) and vertically oscillating Rayleigh waves.
While the accumulation of strain energy within the plate can cause motion (and consequent release of energy) at faults at any location, earthquakes occur with greatest frequency at the boundaries of the tectonic plates. The boundary of the Pacific plate is the source of nearly half of the world’s great earthquakes.Stretching 40,000 km (24,000 miles) around the circumference of the Pacific Ocean, it includes Japan, the west coast of North America, and other highly populated areas, and is aptly termed the Ring of Fire. The interiors of plates, such as ocean basins and continental shields, are areas of low seismicity but are not inactive — the largest earthquakes known to have occurred in North America, for example,occurred in 1811–1812 in the New Madrid area, far from a plate boundary. Tectonic plates move relatively slowly (5 cm per year is relatively fast) and irregularly, with relatively frequent small and only occasional large earthquakes. Forces may build up for decades or centuries at plate interfaces until a large movement occurs all at once. These sudden, violent motions produce the shaking that is felt as an earthquake. The shaking can cause direct damage to buildings, roads, bridges, and other man-made structures as well as triggering landslides, fires, tidal waves (tsunamis), and other damaging phenomena.
Faults are the physical expression of the boundaries between adjacent tectonic plates and thus may be hundreds of miles long. In addition, there may be thousands of shorter faults parallel to or branching out from a main fault zone. Generally, the longer a fault the larger the earthquake it can generate. Beyond the main tectonic plates, there are many smaller subplates, ‘‘platelets,’’ and simple blocks of crust that occasionally move and shift due to the ‘‘jostling’’ of their neighbors and the major plates. The existence of these many sub plates means that smaller but still damaging earthquakes are possible almost anywhere, although often with less likelihood.
Faults are typically classified according to their sense of motion.Basic terms include transform or strike slip (relative fault motion occurs in the horizontal plane, parallel to the strike of the fault), dip-slip (motion at right angles to the strike, up- or down-slip), normal (dip-slip motion, two sides in tension, move away from each other), reverse (dip-slip, two sides in compression, move toward each other), and thrust (low-angle reverse faulting).Generally, earthquakes will be concentrated in the vicinity of faults, faults that are moving more rapidly than others will tend to have higher rates of seismicity, and larger faults are more likely than others to produce a large event. Many faults are identified on regional geological maps, and useful information on fault location and displacement history is available from local and national geological surveys in areas of high seismicity. Considering this information, areas of an expected large earthquake in the near future (usually measured in years or decades) can, and have, been identified. However, earthquakes continue to occur on ‘‘unknown’’ or ‘‘inactive’’ faults. An important development has been the growing recognition of blind thrust faults, which emerged as a result of the several earthquakes in the 1980s, none of which were accompanied by surface faulting (Stein and Yeats 1989). Blind thrust faults are faults at depth occurring under anticlinal folds — since they have only subtle surface expression, their seismogenic potential can only be evaluated by indirect means (Greenwood 1995). Blind thrust faults are particularly worrisome because they are hidden, are associated with folded topography in general, including areas of lower and infrequent seismicity, and, therefore, result in a situation where the potential for an earthquake exists in any area of anticlinal geology, even if there are few or no earthquakes in the historic record. Recent major earthquakes of this type have included the 1980 MW 7.3 El Asnam (Algeria), 1988 MW 6.8 Spitak (Armenia), and 1994 MW 6.7 Northridge (California) events.
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| Focal Mechanisms |
Focal mechanism refers to the direction of slip in an earthquake and the orientation of the fault on which it occurs. Focal mechanisms are determined from seismograms and typically displayed on maps as a black and white ‘‘beach ball’’ symbol. This symbol is the projection on a horizontal plane of the lower half of an imaginary, spherical shell (focal sphere) surrounding the earthquake source (USGS, n.d.). A line is scribed where the fault plane intersects the shell. The beach ball depicts the stress-field orientation at the time of rupture such that the black quadrants contain the tension axis (T), which reflects the minimum compressive stress direction, and the white quadrants contain the pressure axis (P), which reflects the maximum compressive stress direction. For mechanisms calculated from firstmotiondirections (as well as some other methods), more than one focal mechanism solution may fit the data equally well, so that there is an ambiguity in identifying the fault plane on which the slip occurred, from the orthogonal, mathematically equivalent, auxiliary plane. The ambiguity may sometimes be resolved by comparing the two fault-plane orientations to the alignment of small earthquakes and aftershocks. The first three examples describe fault motion that is purely horizontal (strike slip) or vertical (normal or reverse). The oblique-reverse mechanism illustrates that slip may also have components of horizontal and vertical motion.
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| Anatomy of a Subduction Zone |
Subduction refers to the plunging of one plate (e.g., the Pacific) beneath another, into the mantle,due to convergent motion, as shown in.Subduction zones are typically characterized by volcanism, as a portion of the plate (melting in the lower mantle) re-emerges as volcanic lava. Four types of earthquakes are associated with subduction zones: (1) shallow crustal events, in the accretionary wedge; (2) intraplate events, due to plate bending; (3) large interplate events, associated with slippage of one plate past the other; and (4) deep Benioff zone events. Subduction occurs along the west coast of South America at the boundary of the Nazca and South American plate, in Central America (boundary of the Cocos and Caribbean plates), in Taiwan and Japan (boundary of the Philippine and Eurasian plates), and in the North American Pacific Northwest (boundary of the Juan de Fuca and North American plates), among other places. Probabilistic methods can be usefully employed to quantify the likelihood of an earthquake’s occurrence. However, the earthquake generating process is not understood well enough to reliably predict the times, sizes, and locations of earthquakes with precision. In general, therefore, communities must be prepared for an earthquake to occur at any time.
