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Earthquakes

A deficit vanished

Nature volume 394, pages 827–829 (1998)Cite this article

The southern California earthquake deficit — “Now you see it, now you don't”, according to an article in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America1 by Stein and Hanks. Not done with smoke and mirrors, the vanishing act enlisteda careful revision of our understanding of twentieth-century historical seismicity, and it helped to spirit away a thorny issue that arose in 1995. This was the year that the Working Group on California Earthquake Probabilities2 (WGCEP/95) published the report “Seismic Hazards in Southern California: Probable Earthquakes 1994-2024”.

The WGCEP/95 document was remarkable because it struck a new path into earthquake hazard analysis. Previously, geologists and seismologists had independently staked out their own areas of earthquake rate estimation, the heart of hazard calculation. Geologists reckoned the recurrence interval and magnitude of earthquakes by locating active faults, mapping their length and total offset, and resolving their age. Seismologists concentrated on historical catalogues. Earthquake patterns of the past, they presumed, reflect where and how often earthquakes should strike in the future, and how large they will be. Early geological and seismological studies tended to be piecemeal with few cross-checks. Publication of WGCEP/95 brought order to the field by combining diverse information into a quantitative and consistent multidisciplinary assessment. Space geodesy catalysed the leap forward by providing accurate measures of the pattern and pace of tectonic strain that eventually manifests itself as earthquakes.

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Figure 1: Annual rates of earthquakes greater than magnitude m, for southern California.

References

  1. Stein, R. & Hanks, T. Bull. Seism. Soc. Am. 88, 635–652 (1998).

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  2. Working Group on California Earthquake Probabilities Bull. Seism. Soc. Am. 85, 379–439 (1995).

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  3. Field, E. H., Jackson, D. D. & Dolan, J. F. Seismol. Res. Lett. 69, 169(1998).

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  4. Field, E. H., Jackson, D. D. & Dolan, J. F. Bull. Seism. Soc. Am. (submitted).

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  1. Institute of Tectonics, University of California, Santa Cruz, 95064, California, USA

    Steven N. Ward

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  1. Steven N. Ward
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Ward, S. A deficit vanished. Nature 394, 827–829 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/29639

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