GWB Category: Earthquake Preparedness

Haiti’s human and technical needs are enormous, and field geophysics is an idesal way to introduce students to advanced technology while striving to mitigate real problems. Haiti’s subsurface structure and associated hazards are not well understood. This project focused on helping build Haiti’s geoscience capability and searching for the 2010 earthquake fault.

The primary goal of this project is to develop an accurate earthquake catalog that can be used to assess seismic hazard and characterize architecture of the fault system in Timor-Leste. Over two years the capacity will be built to establish independent capability with local scientists so that they can take over the monitoring efforts in a permanent role.

Urban development continues at a fast rate in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas since the devastating January 2010. Accurate characterization of the regional earthquake hazard in this area is key to inform urban development and construction practices during the long reconstruction phase through which Haiti is currently going. This project will provides new GPS geodetic data to refine seismic hazard estimates in the region of rapid economic and demographic growth of southern Haiti, and train the

Haiti is one of the most impoverished nations in the world and highly susceptible to strong ground motion as evidesnced by the January 12, 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake, which led to catastrophic loss of life. Today, Haiti remains at risk of future seismic events. As a result of this project Haiti will be more self-sufficient with respect seismic site response analysis and earthquake design.

Due to large earthquakes, a dense population, and vulnerable residential buildings, Nepal ranks among the countries with the world’s highest seismic risk. In 2015, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake hit Nepal, claiming about 9000 human lives and leaving many homeless. Yet, even larger earthquakes are expected to come in the future. The aim of this project is to test the feasibility of Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) in central Nepal by establishing a low-cost real-time earthquake monitoring

Nepal is centrally located in the Himalayan seismic zone. The 2015 Gorkha earthquake (Mw 7.8) hit central Nepal killing approximately 9,000 people and destroying 1 million houses. It also caused an economic loss of US$ 7 Billion, equivalent to one-third of the country’s gross domestic product. This project was related to basin geometry, site characteristics, and seismic site effects study through microtremor tremor measurements and survey at selected sites in the Kathmandu Valley. It demonstrated

Toward Improved Earthquake Hazard Assessment in Myanmar: Tools, Knowledge and Infrastructure The central goals of this project were to work with in-country partners in Myanmar to establish a system of earthquake preparedness and to ensure that they have the computational tools and knowledge to be involved in all aspects of seismological research — from instrumentation and fieldwork to data analysis — by carrying out noise analyses and examining other data quality metrics for the dataset

Kingston, Jamaica, the capital of the Caribbean island nation of Jamaica, is prone to infrequent but devastating earthquakes and tsunamis, yet the locations of the faults responsible for generating these geohazards are poorly known. This project used state of the art Chirp (3.5khz) submarine seismic imaging and sediment coring techniques to map active faults and recently active submarine slumps in and around Kingston Harbor.