Earth Matters: What 'Virtual Earthquakes' Can Tell About the Big One

Many seismologists believe that predicting the strength of shaking in future earthquakes is more important than predicting exactly when they will occur. That is because if we know how strong the ground will shake, buildings can be designed to withstand that shaking. But predicting the strength of shaking is challenging; large earthquakes are rare (fortunately), and we have few on-scale recordings of strong ground shaking. For that reason, seismologists are increasingly turning to computer simulations to fill the data gap. Many assumptions go into these simulations, and it's important to test their accuracy.

In this talk, geophysicist Greg Beroza will present a new approach to predicting strong ground motion that relies on weak, background shaking that is present in the Earth at all times. This background shaking can be used to construct virtual earthquakes that help predict the strength and variability of future quakes, and improve our understanding of past seismic events.