Abstract: Earthquakes are a significant societal hazard. Over the past half century, earthquakes, and their effects, have accounted for 40% of all fatalities (~1.4 million lives lost) that have resulted from natural
hazards (excluding pandemics) and over 50% of the monetary losses.
Despite the tremendous impact on society that earthquakes have had,
and will continue to have, there are still crucial aspects of the
earthquake process that we do not fully understand. The earthquake
process does not just include the dynamic part of the fault slipping
cataclysmically, resulting in the propagation of seismic waves and
potentially tsunami waves, but also the long period of time between
the earthquakes. This latter aspect of the earthquake cycle is perhaps
the most important to understand for our ability to assess risk to
earthquakes or to forecast earthquakes, as it is during this time
period that stresses build on the fault leading to failure. This
period of stress buildup can be quite long, leading to repeat times
between earthquakes at a given location hundreds to thousands of
years. The foundation of our understanding of earthquakes was proposed over a century ago, and while in some respects the scientific
understanding of earthquakes has made great leaps in the past century, in other respects we’ve not progressed much at all. In this seminar, I will introduce the phases of the earthquake cycle, from theories to observations, focusing on work the Quantitative Earthquake Dynamics group at UM (QED@UM) has been doing to address our understanding of earthquakes, with an ultimate hope to forecast earthquake behavior.