Imperial College London
Alternate

Professor Julian J Bommer

Faculty of Engineering, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Senior Research Investigator
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 5984j.bommer Website CV

 
 
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Location

 

Skempton BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Bommer:2020:10.1007/s10518-019-00718-w,
author = {Bommer, J and NIevas, CI and Helen, C and van, Elk J},
doi = {10.1007/s10518-019-00718-w},
journal = {Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering},
pages = {1--35},
title = {Global occurrence and impact of small-to-medium magnitude earthquakes: A statistical analysis},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10518-019-00718-w},
volume = {18},
year = {2020}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Despite their much smaller individual contribution to the global counts of casualties and damage than theirlarger counterparts, earthquakes with moment magnitudes Mw in the range 4.0-5.5 may dominate seismichazard and risk in areas of low overall seismicity, a statement that is particularly true for regions whereanthropogenically-induced earthquakes are predominant. With the risk posed by these earthquakescausing increasing alarm in certain areas of the globe, it is of interest to determine what proportion ofearthquakes in this magnitude range that occur sufficiently close to population or the built environment doactually result in damage and/or casualties. For this purpose, a global catalogue of potentially damagingevents—that is, earthquakes deemed as potentially capable of causing damage or casualties based on aseries of pre-defined criteria—has been generated and contrasted against a database of reportedlydamaging small-to-medium earthquakes compiled in parallel to this work. This paper discusses the criteriaand methodology followed to define such a set of potentially damaging events, from the issues inherent toearthquake catalogue compilation to the definition of criteria to establish how much potential exposure issufficient to consider each earthquake a threat. The resulting statistics show that, on average, around 2% ofall potentially-damaging shocks were actually reported as damaging, though the proportion variessignificantly in time as a consequence of the impact of accessibility to data on damage and seismicity ingeneral. Inspection of the years believed to be more complete suggests that a value of around 4 to 5%might be a more realistic figure.
AU  - Bommer,J
AU  - NIevas,CI
AU  - Helen,C
AU  - van,Elk J
DO  - 10.1007/s10518-019-00718-w
EP  - 35
PY  - 2020///
SN  - 1570-761X
SP  - 1
TI  - Global occurrence and impact of small-to-medium magnitude earthquakes: A statistical analysis
T2  - Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10518-019-00718-w
UR  - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10518-019-00718-w
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/73080
VL  - 18
ER  -
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