By Sid Perkins
From Victoria, British Columbia, at a meeting of the Seismological Society of America
Scientists have long observed that the ground motions from an earthquake are stronger on a hill than they are on nearby plains. Now, they’re developing computer models that reflect that phenomenon.
Most previous simulations of a temblor’s ground motions on uneven terrain have emulated geologic features made of a single material or used simplified representations of earthquake waves, says Jacobo Bielak of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Those models haven’t accurately reproduced the amplification of earthquake waves that seismologists actually measure. Bielak and Chiaki Yoshimura of the Taisei Research Center in Yokohama, Japan, have developed a more complicated representation.