This is a past event
Please join us for a research seminar given by Dr. Simona Colombelli of the University of Naples on “Real-time prediction of the earthquake magnitude: is it feasible?” All are welcome to attend.
Abstract: The rupture process of an earthquake is the result of a complex and random combination of many factors, and the modality in which seismic fractures nucleate and propagate still represents an unsolved issue. The process of rupture nucleation and propagation has been deeply investigated through laboratory experiments and theoretical modelling, but few and contradictory observations exist at the scale of earthquake fault zones.
In the context of Earthquake Early Warning system, the magnitude estimates are done using a small portion of the P-wave signal while the rupture is still ongoing. Whether and how a few seconds of signal can be used for the magnitude prediction still is a debated question. Some authors support the idea of the unpredictable earthquake magnitude, i.e., they believe that there is no way to distinguish a small shock from a large event, until the rupture process has completed. Other authors, instead, claim that small and large earthquakes are different from the early stage of the rupture.
Within this context, we analyze the time evolution of the early P-wave displacement amplitude to understand whether this is informative regarding the final earthquake size. We found a rapid initial increase of the peak displacement for small events and a slower growth for large earthquakes, indicating that earthquakes breaking in a region with a large critical slip displacement value have a larger probability to grow into a large size rupture than those originating in a region with a smaller critical displacement value.