Understanding Past Earthquakes

Author Biography

Dr. Austin Elliott is an earthquake geologist using observations of past and contemporary earthquakes to understand coseismic rupture processes and the behavior of faults and fault systems through the earthquake cycle. His research employs techniques from the domains of terrestrial paleoseismology and tectonic geomorphology as well as geodetic imaging of deformation from earthquakes and fault motion. Austin also has used historical seismology and eyewitness reporting of earthquake phenomena to refine the magnitudes and locations of past earthquakes. The inspiration for this book arose from the recognition of overlap and complementarity of these techniques and the need for practitioners including himself to be well versed in the plethora of ways that source parameters of past earthquakes can be determined, estimated, or constrained.   Dr. Christoph Grützner uses mainly paleoseismology and tectonic geomorphology to investigate active faults. He has worked in extensional settings, for example in Germany, Greece, and Peru, and in regions with predominantly reverse and strike-slip fault motion such as Central Asia and the European Alps. For many years, his main interest was on rather slowly slipping faults in the interior of the continents. From these studies Christoph realized that low slip rates and long earthquake recurrence intervals set limits to what can be achieved with classical paleoseismology. Complementary techniques are needed to gather a complete picture of the active tectonics of such regions. This was the motivation for this book.