Earthquake ground shaking can be strongly affected by local geology and is often amplified by soft sediments. In this study, we introduce a global geomorphological model for sediment thickness as a protentional parameter for predicting this site amplification. The results show that including geology and geomorphology in site-amplification predictions adds important value and that global or regional models for sediment thickness from fields beyond engineering seismology are worth considering.

For the release of cross-country harmonised hazard and risk models, a communication strategy co-defined by the model developers and communication experts is needed. The strategy should consist of a communication concept, user testing, expert feedback mechanisms, and the establishment of a network with outreach specialists. Here we present our approach for the release of the European Seismic Hazard Model and European Seismic Risk Model and provide practical recommendations for similar efforts.

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.