Search

Sliding of natural and artificial slopes generally occurs during or following strong earthquakes. Such sliding is greatly affected by a combination of geological conditions and earthquake loading. Earthquake-induced landslides often cause more damage to infrastructure and human lives than the earthquake itself. Pseudo-static analysis is widely implemented as one of several design methods used in engineering practice to assess the seismic stability of natural and artificial slopes. However, the most important issue of pseudo-static analysis is to select the most appropriate method for measuring seismic coefficient. In order to investigate this, back analysis was conducted for surficial slides subjected to strong ground motion during the 2004 Mid-Niigata prefecture earthquake in Japan. This paper surveyed the stochastic properties of earthquake-induced surficial slides and clearly showed that the obtained results were applicable to back analysis of shear strength and seismic coefficient. In back analysis, soil properties such as soil strength and density and sliding depth were assumed as random variables owing to their uncertainties. Seismic coefficient is also assumed to be a random variable and varies with distance from the epicenter fault line. The analysis of 4504 recorded surficial slides clearly shows a unique relationship of landslide occurrence ratio with slope angle and distance from the epicenter fault line. This study’s results enhance the calculation of the shear strength of weathered soil covering slopes and the horizontal seismic coefficient through back analysis procedure. By considering possible stochastic properties of variables, some case studies were implemented in the back analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dense strong motion observation networks provided us with valuable data for studying strong motion generation from large earthquakes. From kinematic waveform inversion of seismic data, the slip distribution on the fault surface of large earthquakes is known to be spatially heterogeneous. Because heterogeneities in the slip and stress drop distributions control the generation of near-source ground motion, it is important to characterize these heterogeneities for past earthquakes in constructing a source model for reliable prediction of strong ground motion. The stress changes during large earthquakes on the faults recently occurring in Japan are estimated from the detailed slip models obtained by the kinematic waveform inversion. The stress drops on and off asperities are summarized on the basis of the stress change distributions obtained here. In this paper, we define the asperity to be a rectangular area whose slip is 1.5 or more times larger than the average slip over the fault according to the previous study for inland crustal earthquakes. The average static stress drops on the asperities of the earthquakes studied here are in the range 6-23 MPa, whereas those off the asperities are below 3 MPa. We compiled the stress drop on the asperities together with a data set from previous studies of other inland earthquakes in Japan and elsewhere. The static stress drop on the asperity depends on its depth, and we obtained an empirical relationship between the static stress drop and the asperity's depth. Moreover, surface-breaking asperities seemed to have smaller stress drops than buried asperities. Simple ground motion simulations using the characterized asperity source models reveal that deep asperities generate larger ground motion than shallow asperities, because of the different stress drops of the asperities. These characteristics can be used for advanced source modeling in strong ground motion prediction for inland crustal earthquakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aki (1969) first modeled coda waves of a local earthquake as a superposition of scattered surface waves. This paper attempts to clarify the constituents of surface-wave coda at long periods at very long lapse times. For a large earthquake of magnitude 7 or larger, vertical component oscillation in periods from 90 to 180 s persists for more than 20 hours from the earthquake origin time. Although the early portion of the coda envelope is successfully modeled by assuming incoherent scattered Rayleigh waves by heterogeneities distributed all over the Earth, the later potion of the observed coda envelope (roughly later than 35,000 s) has systematically larger amplitude than theoretical prediction. To clarify the cause of this discrepancy, we studied the constituents of vertical-component seismograms of three large earthquakes recorded by the F-net in Japan using the f- k power spectral analysis. We found that the direct and scattered fundamental-mode Rayleigh waves of velocity about 3.7 km/s are dominant in the earlier part of each envelope. It justifies the use of a scattering model of the fundamental Rayleigh waves for synthesizing the envelope. At lapse times later than 20,000 s–35,000 s, higher modes with phase velocities around 20 km/s become dominant. The transition time to the dominance of higher modes is found to become earlier for a deeper focus earthquake. The small coda attenuation factor from (1.90±0.23) × 10−3 to (2.38±0.32) × 10−3 estimated from later coda envelopes recorded at IRIS stations distributed worldwide also agrees with the attenuation factor of spheroidal modes according to PREM. We may interpret that higher mode waves are uniformly distributed at large lapse time due to large velocity dispersion and/or scattering and they dominate over the fundamental mode waves because of smaller attenuation in the lower mantle. The coda attenuation measurement proposed by Aki is found to be useful even for long periods and at very large lapse times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]