Authors / CoAuthors
Cummins, P.
Abstract
Earthquakes represent an increasing threat to Oceania because of increasing concentration of populations in built environments that are vulnerable either to ground shaking or to landslides or tsunamis generated by earthquakes. The estimated impact of earthquake shaking is strongly dependent on details of the earthquake rupture such as stress drop, depth and rupture extent. For example, the magnitude 7.5 South Sumatra earthquake, 60 km from the city of Padang (30/09/09), killed over 1100 people, while the much larger South Sumatra earthquakes of magnitude 8.4 and 7.9 (12/09/07), only 130 km from Bengkulu and 190 km from Padang, respectively, collectively killed only 12 people. Similarly the ability of earthquakes to generate tsunamis that impact coastal populations is strongly influenced by the updip extent of fault rupture and its orientation with respect to population centres: the tsunami generated by the magnitude 8.1 Samoa earthquake (29/09/09) killed over 180 people, while that generated by the magnitude 7.8 Vanuatu earthquake (7/10/09) killed no one. Our ability to forecast the potential impacts of future earthquakes on a population centre is therefore dependent not only on our knowledge of the occurrence probability for an event of a certain magnitude, but also on our understanding of the different styles of rupture that may occur. Rapid estimate of impact, for purposes such as tsunami early warning or early assessment of post-disaster response requirements, is dependent on our abilit to rapidly and reliably estimate not only magnitude and epicentre, but also details of earthquake rupture.
Product Type
nonGeographicDataset
eCat Id
70057
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Keywords
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- External Publication
- ( Theme )
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- earthquakes
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- geohazards
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- tsunamis
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- remote sensing
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- marine
- Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)
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- Earth Sciences
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- Published_Internal
Publication Date
2010-01-01T00:00:00
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