Earthquake Surface Rupture: A Brief Survey on Interdisciplinary Research and Practice from Geology to Geotechnical Engineering

Distributed faulting following normal earthquakes: reassessment and updating of scaling relations

“…Our data show a very steep decrease in the probability of faulting at distances higher than 1 km from the primary fault, pointing to a fundamental difference between near and far-fields. The pattern of fault rupture in the near field has been recently explored by several authors, by means of observation of actual faulting, numerical or analytical models (e.g., Fletcher and Spelz, 2009;Teran et al, 2015;Gold et al, 2015;Loukidis et al, 2009;Treiman, 2010 type, thickness and nature of the materials above bedrock (Bray et al, 1994;Avar and Hudyma 2019). The integration of modern field and remote technologies allows to capture the finer details of surface rupture; a geologically sound interpretation of such data is pivotal to the understanding of surface rupture, which in turn is essential for engineering design and eventually mitigation measures.…”

Conditional probability of distributed surface rupturing during normal-faulting earthquakes

“…Nine of them are from the western US and have already been analyzed in terms of PFDHA by Youngs et al (2003), who, in turn, used data compiled by Pezzopane and Dawson (1996). Data for the remaining 12 earthquakes were collected from the scientific literature or available databases (i.e., the SURE Project; Baize et al, 2019). Table 1 lists the main details and the data source for each earthquake.…”

“…We stress that the addition of events from different tectonic provinces and climatic conditions will enable a better characterization of distributed faulting, resulting in an overall more reliable scaling relation. In this sense, we follow the recommendation of Baize et al (2019) and uploaded a shapefile with the rupture sections for the 13 events not already available in the SURE database to an online repository (see the "Data Availability" section of this paper for further details).…”

“…The additional case histories are generally more recent in time with respect to those considered by Youngs, with the exception of the 1915 Fucino (Italy) and 1928 Subukia Valley earthquake (Kenya) events. Particular effort was devoted to the collection of data on M < 6.5 earthquakes; they were not adequately represented in the Youngs' database but pose a significant threat to society, as they are much more frequent than stronger earthquakes (Baize et al, 2019).…”

“…Concerning normal faults, the reference paper for PFDHA is still the work by Youngs et al (2003), which was published almost 20 years ago and analyzed a dataset of US earthquakes. Since then, additional datasets have been acquired (see Baize et al 2019, for a comprehensive review on the efforts devoted to building a unified database of fault displacement), and a general underestimation of the relations of Youngs et al (2003) in the far field was recently pointed out by Ferrario and Livio (2018). In this work, we present data and improved regression equations for the conditional probability of off-fault rupture.…”