Hazard maps are fundamental to earthquake risk reduction, but research is missing on how to design them. We review the visualization literature to identify evidence-based criteria for color and classification schemes for hazard maps. We implement these for the German seismic hazard map, focusing on communicating four properties of seismic hazard. Our evaluation finds that the redesigned map successfully communicates seismic hazard in Germany, improving on the baseline map for two key properties.

To investigate cumulative damage on extended building portfolios, we propose an alternative and modular method to probabilistically integrate sets of single-hazard vulnerability models that are being constantly developed by experts from various research fields to be used within a multi-risk context. We demonstrate its application by assessing the economic losses expected for the residential building stock of Lima, Peru, a megacity commonly exposed to consecutive earthquake and tsunami scenarios.

The overall objective of the CHENILLE project is to performed an in-situ experiment in the Underground Reaserch Laboratory of Tournemire (Southern France) consisting of hydraulic and thermal stimulation of a fault zone. This experiment is monitored with extensive geophysical means (passive seismic, active seismic, distributed fiber optics for temperature measurements) in order to unravel the physical processes taking place during the stimulation for a better charactization of fault zones.

The surface wave magnitude M_s is the only magnitude type that can be computed since the dawn of modern observational seismology (beginning of the last century) for most shallow earthquakes worldwide. As a result of a 10+ year effort to digitize pre-1971 measurements of surface wave amplitudes and periods from printed bulletins, we are able to recompute M_s using a large set of stations and obtain it for the first time for several hundred earthquakes.

We present variable-resolution boundaries based on central Voronoi tessellations (CVTs) to spatially aggregate building exposure models and physical vulnerability assessment. Their geo-cell sizes are inversely proportional to underlying distributions that account for the combination between hazard intensities and exposure proxies. We explore their efficiency and associated uncertainties in risk–loss estimations and mapping from decoupled scenario-based earthquakes and tsunamis in Lima, Peru.

We provide a comprehensive overview of the content in terms of moment magnitude (M_w) in the Bulletin of the International Seismological Centre (ISC). M_w is the preferred magnitude to characterize earthquakes in various research topics (e.g. Earth seismicity rates) and other applications (e.g. seismic hazard). We describe first the contribution of global agencies and agencies operating at a regional scale and then discuss features of M_w via different sets of comparisons.

In this article we try to make the broad geoscience community and especially the seismological community aware of the availability of earthquake source mechanisms in the Bulletin of the International Seismological Centre (ISC) and encourage researchers to make use of this data set in future research. Moreover, we acknowledge the data providers, and we encourage others to routinely submit their source mechanism solutions to the ISC.

We show the landslide response to the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake (M_w 7.1) in central Kyushu (Japan). Landslides are concentrated to the northeast of the rupture, coinciding with the propagation direction of the earthquake. This azimuthal variation in the landslide concentration is linked to the seismic rupture process itself and not to classical landslide susceptibility factors. We propose a new ground-motion model that links the seismic radiation pattern with the landslide distribution.

We outline work done to improve and extend the new reference catalogue of global earthquakes instrumentally recorded since 1904, the ISC-GEM Catalogue. We have added thousands of earthquakes between 1904 and 1959 and in recent years compared to the 2013 release. As earthquake catalogues are widely used for different aspects of research, we believe that this dataset will be instrumental for years to come for researchers involved in studies on seismic hazard and patterns of the Earth's seismicity.

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We observed with seismic data in the entire region of Turkey and surroundings the lithosphere–asthenosphere boundary (LAB). It is located generally between 80 and 100km depth outside the subduction zone. No change of the LAB depth was observed across the North and East Anatolian faults. The LAB of the subducting African plate is observed down to about 150km depth from the Aegean to the east of Cyprus, with a tear at Cyprus.