scholarly journals Characteristic Earthquake Magnitude Frequency Distributions on Faults Calculated From Consensus Data in California

Author(s):  
Tom Parsons ◽  
Eric L. Geist ◽  
Rodolfo Console ◽  
Roberto Carluccio
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Rollins ◽  
Tim Wright ◽  
Jonathan Weiss ◽  
Andrew Hooper ◽  
Richard Walters

<p>Geodetic measurements of crustal deformation rates can provide important constraints on a region’s earthquake hazard that purely seismicity-based hazard models may miss. For example, geodesy might show that strain (or a deficit of seismic moment) is accumulating faster than the total rate at which known earthquakes have released it, implying that the long-term hazard may include larger earthquakes with long recurrence intervals (and/or temporal increases in seismicity rates). Conversely, the moment release rate in recent earthquakes might surpass the geodetic moment buildup rate, suggesting that the long-term-average earthquake activity and hazard may in fact may be more quiescent than might be estimated using the earthquake history alone. Such geodetic constraints, however, have traditionally been limited by poor spatial and/or temporal sampling, resulting in ambiguities about how the lithosphere accommodates strain in space and time that can bias estimates of the resulting hazard. High-resolution deformation maps address this limitation by imaging (rather than presuming and/or modelling) where and how deformation takes place. These maps are now within reach for the Alpine-Himalayan Belt – one of the most populous and seismically hazardous regions on Earth – thanks to the COMET-LiCSAR InSAR processing system, which performs large-scale automated processing and timeseries analysis of Sentinel-1 data provided by the EU’s Copernicus programme. We are pairing LiCSAR products with GNSS data to generate high-resolution maps of interseismic surface motion (velocity) and strain rate for the Anatolia region. Here we quantitively investigate what these strain rate distributions imply for seismic hazard in this region, using two approaches in parallel.</p><p>First, building on previous work, we develop a fully probability-based method to pair geodesy and seismic catalogs to estimate the recurrence times of large, moderate and small earthquakes in a given region. We assume that earthquakes 1) obey a power-law magnitude-frequency distribution up to a maximum magnitude and 2) collectively release seismic moment at the same rate that we estimate it is accumulating from the strain rate maps. Iterating over various magnitude-frequency distributions and their governing parameters, and formally incorporating uncertainties in moment buildup rate and the magnitudes of recorded earthquakes, we build a probabilistic long-term-average earthquake model for Anatolia as a whole, including the most likely maximum earthquake magnitude. Second, we estimate how seismic hazard may vary from place to place within Anatolia. Using insights from dislocation models, we identify two key signatures of a locked fault in a strain rate field, allowing us to convert the newly developed strain maps to “effective fault maps.” Additionally, we explore how characteristics of earthquake magnitude-frequency distributions may scale with the rate of strain (or moment) buildup, and what these scaling relations imply for the distribution of hazard in Anatolia, using the seismic catalog to evaluate these hypotheses. We also explore the implications of our findings for seismic hazard and address how to expand these approaches to the Alpine-Himalaya Belt as a whole.</p>


Author(s):  
M.W. Stirling ◽  
C. J. N. Wilson

We commence development of a volcanic hazard model for New Zealand by applying the well- established methods of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis to volcanoes. As part of this work we use seismologically-based methods to develop eruption volume - frequency distributions for the Okataina and Taupo volcanoes of the central Taupo Volcanic Zone, New Zealand. Our procedure is to use the geologic and historical record of large eruptions (erupted magma volumes ≥ 0.01 cubic km for Taupo and ≥ 0.5 cubic km for Okataina) to construct eruption volume-frequency distributions for the two volcanoes. The two volcanoes show log-log distributions of decreasing frequency as a function of eruption volume, analogous to the shape of earthquake magnitude-frequency distributions constructed from seismicity catalogues. On the basis of these eruption volume-frequency distributions we estimate the maximum eruption volumes that Taupo and Okataina are capable of producing at probability levels of relevance to engineers and planners. We find that a maximum eruption volume of 0.1 cubic km is expected from Taupo with a 10% probability in 50 years, while Okataina may not produce a large eruption at this probability level. However, at the more conservative 2% probability in 50 years, both volcanoes are expected to produce large eruptions (0.5 cubic km for Okataina and 1 cubic km for Taupo). Our study therefore shows significant differences in eruption probabilities for volcanoes in the same physiographic region, and therefore highlights the importance of establishing unique eruption databases for all volcanoes in a hazard analysis.


1988 ◽  
Vol 20 (6-7) ◽  
pp. 39-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Wright

Copper and cadmium monitoring in Chesapeake Bay sediments indicates that metal contamination exists in nursery areas for striped bass (Moronesaxatilis), which has been in serious decline over the last 17 years. Whole water metal concentrations in one spawning river were within an order of magnitude of published acutely toxic concentrations. Larval striped bass were exposed in the laboratory to copper and cadmium concentrations which were acutely toxic over a 96h period (24 and 19 µg L−1, respectively), and to sub-lethal concentrations of these metals over a three week period. Larvae from acutely toxic metal treatments, sub-lethal metal concentrations and control tanks were analyzed for cadmium and copper and the frequency distribution of metal body burdens was compared with field data. The distribution of copper concentrations in laboratory-exposed larvae was completely within the range of field specimens, and there was considerable overlap in cadmium frequency distributions from laboratory and field larvae. These results together with other published data suggest that environmental metal concentrations in some spawning tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay may pose a threat to striped bass, and the suggestion is made that greater efforts should be made to link laboratory and field toxicological data.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-134
Author(s):  
Sanjeev Kumar ◽  
Suneeta Agarwal ◽  
Ranvijay

Background: DNA and Protein sequences of an organism contain a variety of repeated structures of various types. These repeated structures play an important role in Molecular biology as they are related to genetic backgrounds of inherited diseases. They also serve as a marker for DNA mapping and DNA fingerprinting. Efficient searching of maximal and super maximal repeats in DNA/Protein sequences can lead to many other applications in the area of genomics. Moreover, these repeats can also be used for identification of critical diseases by finding the similarity between frequency distributions of repeats in viruses and genomes (without using alignment algorithms). Objective: The study aims to develop an efficient tool for searching maximal and super maximal repeats in large DNA/Protein sequences. Methods: The proposed tool uses a newly introduced data structure Induced Enhanced Suffix Array (IESA). IESA is an extension of enhanced suffix array. It uses induced suffix array instead of classical suffix array. IESA consists of Induced Suffix Array (ISA) and an additional array-Longest Common Prefix (LCP) array. ISA is an array of all sorted suffixes of the input sequence while LCP array stores the lengths of the longest common prefixes between all pairs of consecutive suffixes in an induced suffix array. IESA is known to be efficient w.r.t. both time and space. It facilitates the use of secondary memory for constructing the large suffix-array. Results: An open source standalone tool named MSR-IESA for searching maximal and super maximal repeats in DNA/Protein sequences is provided at https://github.com/sanjeevalg/MSRIESA. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other state of the art works w.r.t. to both time and space. Conclusion: The proposed tool MSR-IESA is remarkably efficient for the analysis of DNA/Protein sequences, having maximal and super maximal repeats of any length. It can be used for identification of well-known diseases.


1970 ◽  
Vol 19 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 264-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
F.H. Reuling ◽  
J.T. Schwartz

In the late 1950's and early 1960's, it became evident that some glaucoma patients developed elevations of intraocular pressure, which were difficult to control, following prolonged use of systemic or ocular medications containing corticosteroids (Chandler, 1955, Alfano, 1963; Armaly, 1963). In addition, some patients without glaucoma, when treated with steroids for long periods of time, developed clinical signs of chronic simple glaucoma (McLean, 1950; François, 1954; Covell, 1958; Linner, 1959; Goldman, 1962). Fortunately, the elevation of intraocular pressure was reversible if the drug was discontinued.Over the past decade, extensive investigation of the “steroid response” has been undertaken. For this presentation, the steroid response may be considered as a gradual elevation of intraocular pressure, occurring over several weeks, in an eye being medicated with corticosteroid drops several times a day. The elevation in pressure is usually accompanied by a reduction in the facility of aqueous outflow. When relatively large numbers of subjects were tested with topical steroids, so that a wide range of responsiveness could be observed, a variation in individual sensitivity was demonstrated. Frequency distributions of intraocular pressure or change in pressure following steroids showed a skew toward the high side. On the basis of trimodal characteristics which they observed in such frequency distributions, Becker and Hahn (1964), Becker (1965) and Armaly (1965, 1966) considered the possible existence of several genetically determined subpopulations. These investigators distinguished three subpopulations on the basis of low, intermediate, and high levels of pressure response. It was hypothesized that these levels of response characterized three phenotypes, corresponding to the three possible genotypes of an allele pair, wherein one member of the pair determined a low level of response, and the other member determined a high level of response (Armaly, 1967).


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