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This story is from the category Libraries and Components
Date posted: 24/01/2014 Stanford scientists are using weak vibrations generated by the Earth's oceans to produce "virtual earthquakes" that can be used to predict the ground movement and shaking hazard to buildings from real quakes. The new technique, detailed in the Jan. 24 issue of the journal Science, was used to confirm a prediction that Los Angeles will experience stronger-than-expected ground movement if a major quake occurs south of the city. "We used our virtual earthquake approach to reconstruct large earthquakes on the southern San Andreas Fault and studied the responses of the urban environment of Los Angeles to such earthquakes," said lead author Marine Denolle, who recently received her PhD in geophysics from Stanford and is now at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. The new technique capitalizes on the fact that earthquakes aren't the only sources of seismic waves. "If you put a seismometer in the ground and there's no earthquake, what do you record? It turns out that you record something," said study leader Greg Beroza, a geophysics professor at Stanford. What the instruments will pick up is a weak, continuous signal known as the ambient seismic field. This omnipresent field is generated by ocean waves interacting with the solid Earth. When the waves collide with each other, they generate a pressure pulse that travels through the ocean to the sea floor and into the Earth's crust. "These waves are billions of times weaker than the seismic waves generated by earthquakes," Beroza said. In the study, the team used their virtual earthquake approach to confirm the accuracy of a prediction, made in 2006 by supercomputer simulations, that if the southern San Andreas Fault section of California were to rupture and spawn an earthquake, some of the seismic waves traveling northward would be funneled toward Los Angeles along a 60-mile-long (100-kilometer-long) natural conduit that connects the city with the San Bernardino Valley. This passageway is composed mostly of sediments, and acts to amplify and direct waves toward the Los Angeles region. Until now, there was no way to test whether this funneling action, known as the waveguide-to-basin effect, actually takes place because a major quake has not occurred along that particular section of the San Andreas Fault in more than 150 years. See the full Story via external site: news.stanford.edu Most recent stories in this category (Libraries and Components): 17/02/2015: New algorithms Geolocate a video from its images and sounds |
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