Tracking Earthquake Cascades

In assessing their risk to society, earthquakes are best characterized as cascades that can propagate from the natural environment into the socio-economic (built) environment. Strong earthquakes rarely occur as isolated events; they usually cluster in foreshock-mainshock-aftershock sequences, seismic swarms, and extended sequences of large earthquakes that propagate along major fault systems. These cascades are regulated by stress-mediated interactions among faults driven by tectonic loading. Within these cascades, each large event can itself cause a chain reaction in which the primary effects of faulting and ground shaking induce secondary effects, including tsunami, landslides, liquefaction, and set off destructive processes within the built environment, such as fires and radiation leakage from nuclear plants. Recent earthquakes have demonstrated how the socio-economic effects of large earthquakes can reverberate for many years. To reduce earthquake risk and improve the resiliency of communities to earthquake damage, society depends on five geotechnologies for tracking earthquake cascades: long-term probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA), short-term (operational) earthquake forecasting, earthquake early warning, tsunami warning, and the rapid production of post-event information for response and recovery (see figure). In this presentation, I describe how recent advances in earthquake system science are leading to improvements in this geotechnology pipeline. In particular, I will highlight the role of earthquake simulations in predicting strong ground motions and their secondary effects before and during earthquake cascades