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Published November 11, 2004 | Published
Journal Article Open

The diversity of the physics of earthquakes

Abstract

Earthquakes exhibit diverse characteristics. Most shallow earthquakes are "brittle" in the sense that they excite seismic waves efficiently. However, some earthquakes are slow, as characterized by tsunami earthquakes and even slower events without any obvious seismic radiation. Also, some earthquakes, like the 1994 Bolivian deep earthquake, involved a large amount of fracture and thermal energy and may be more appropriately called a thermal event, rather than an earthquake. Some earthquakes are caused by processes other than faulting, such as landslides. This diversity can be best understood in terms of the difference in the partition of the released potential energy to radiated, fracture, and thermal energies during an earthquake. This approach requires detailed studies on quantification of earthquakes and estimation of various kinds of energies involved in earthquake processes. This paper reviews the progress in this field from historical and personal points of view and discusses its implications for earthquake damage mitigation.

Additional Information

© 2004 The Japan Academy. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Communicated by Yoshibumi Tomoda, M.J.A. Received August 24, 2004; accepted September 13, 2004. I would like to thank Dr. Yoshibumi Tomoda, M. J. A., for encouraging me to write this a1ticle. I also thank Dr. Luis Rivera for reading the manuscript and offering me helpful comments, Dr. Art McGarr for discussions on fracture energy, and Dr. Chen Ji for providing me with the data on rupture patterns of the Hector Mine, Chi-Chi, and Denali earthquakes.

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August 19, 2023
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