This week from AGU: New Oso report, rockfall in Yosemite, and earthquake models

(Press-News.org) From AGU's blogs: Oso disaster had its roots in earlier landslides

A research team tasked with being some of the first scientists and engineers to evaluate extreme events has issued its findings on disastrous Oso, Washington, landslide. The report studies the conditions and causes related to the March 22 mudslide that killed 43 people and destroyed the Steelhead Haven neighborhood in Oso, Washington. The team from the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association, funded by the National Science Foundation, determined that intense rainfall in the three weeks before the slide likely was a major issue, but factors such as altered groundwater migration, weakened soil consistency because of previous landslides and changes in hillside stresses played key roles.

From this week's Eos: Reducing Rockfall Risk in Yosemite National Park

The glacially sculpted granite walls of Yosemite Valley attract 4 million visitors a year, but rockfalls from these cliffs pose substantial hazards. Responding to new studies, the National Park Service recently took actions to reduce the human risk posed by rockfalls in Yosemite National Park.

From AGU's journals: A new earthquake model may explain discrepancies in San Andreas fault slip

Investigating the earthquake hazards of the San Andreas Fault System requires an accurate understanding of accumulating stresses and the history of past earthquakes. Faults tend to go through an "earthquake cycle"—locking and accumulating stress, rupturing in an earthquake, and locking again in a well-accepted process known as "elastic rebound." One of the key factors in preparing for California's next "Big One" is estimating the fault slip rate, the speed at which one side of the San Andreas Fault is moving past the other.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways geoscientists study fault slip. Geologists formulate estimates by studying geologic features at key locations to study slip rates through time. Geodesists, scientists who measure the size and shape of the planet, use technologies like GPS and satellite radar interferometry to estimate the slip rate, estimates which often differ from the geologists' estimations.

In a recent study by Tong et al., the authors develop a new three-dimensional viscoelastic earthquake cycle model that represents 41 major fault segments of the San Andreas Fault System. While previous research has suggested that there are discrepancies between the fault slip rates along the San Andreas as measured by geologic and geodetic means, the authors find that there are no significant differences between the two measures if the thickness of the tectonic plate and viscoelasticity are taken into account. The authors find that the geodetic slip rate depends on the plate thickness over the San Andreas, a variable lacking in previous research.

The team notes that of the 41 studied faults within the San Andreas Fault system, a small number do in fact have disagreements between the geologic and geodetic slip rates. These differences could be attributed to inadequate data coverage or to incomplete knowledge of the fault structures or the chronological sequence of past events.

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