High Probability of Foreshock Occurrence and Significant Probability of Multiple Events Associated with Magnitude ≥6 Earthquakes in Nevada, U.S.A.

摘要

Sixty percent of magnitude 5.5 and larger earthquakes in the western Cordillera were preceded by foreshocks (Doser, 1989). Foreshocks also preceded the 2008 Wells (Mw 6.0; Smith et al., 2011) and the 2008 Mogul (M_w 5.0; Smith et al., 2008; de-Polo, 2011) earthquakes in Nevada. Understanding foreshocks and their behavior is important because of their potential use for earthquake forecasting and foreshocks felt by communities act as a natural alarm that can motivate people to engage in seismic mitigation. A majority of larger earthquakes in Nevada had foreshocks, and several were multiple earthquakes of magnitude ≥6.Multiple major earthquakes can shake a community with damaging ground motion multiple times within a short period of time, such as happened in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2010 and 2011 (Gledhill et al., 2011; Bradley and Cubrinovski, 2011). Several of Nevada's multiple events occurred within 12 hours of each other, which presents a particular hazard to emergency responders and the general public.