Virginia Tech’s associate professor, Adrian Rodriguez-Marek, stated that the urban land use models are altered due to the growth in population and lack of new metropolitan land, which has placed several people and infrastructure in topographic regions that are vulnerable to geographical outcomes during earthquakes.
He added that the main hurdle in understanding and credibly simulating topographic effects is due to the lack of seismic recordings from the thickly instrumented locations with topographic characteristics.
New testing was performed in Utah’s sharp, mountainous area by means of mining induced proceedings and has offered a new data set essential for better forecasting.
This testing being a part of the National Science Foundation financed project has included five institutes through the United States, wherein Virginia Tech’s Rodriguez-Marek is the main investigator. The focus of this project is to increase the understanding of surface topography effects on seismic risk and ground motions during an earthquake. The project’s objective is to expand the design-ready tools for explaining the topographical effects on ground motions.
The other participants are Georgia Tech, the University North Carolina at Charlotte, the University of Arkansas and the University of Washington, besides Virginia Tech. This project has employed the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) equipment locations at the University of Texas at Austin and at the University of California at Davis.
The primary recordings incorporated over 50 mining-induced seismic programs. This data was collected by the scientists from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Arkansas.
As said by Rodriguez-Marek, the completion of the study will bring essential data for altering the building codes and to enhance the security of the building environment.
He stated that due to the unpredictable and occasional earthquakes, the seismic activity that is shallow and stimulated by the stress relief consequent to long-wall mining has offered a good seismic energy source for this study.
Rodriguez-Marek said that the initial results have demonstrated greater intensity in ground motion near the peak or crest of the slope. The previous information was employed to measure effects’ of the mathematical models and to design the phase II testing conducted during 2011 summer. Results are pending.
Source: http://www.vt.edu/