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Section: Application Domains

Seismology

We already applied our techniques to the study of strong ground motion and associated seismic risk in the Los Angeles basin area. This region consists of a basin of great dimension (more than 100 km × 100 km) which is one of the deepest sedimentary basins in the world (the sedimentary layer has a maximum thickness of 8.5 km underneath Downtown Los Angeles), and also one of the most dangerous in the world because of the amplification and trapping of seismic waves. In the case of a small earthquake in Hollywood (September 9, 2001), well recorded by more than 140 stations of the Southern California seismic network TriNet, we managed for the first time to fit the three components of the displacement vector, most of the previous studies focusing on the vertical component only, and to obtain a good agreement until relatively short periods (2 seconds).

We wish to improve these studies of seismic risk in densely populated areas by considering other regions of the world, for example the Tokyo basin, the area of Kobe or the Mexico City region. We also plan to generalize this type of calculations to the knowledge and modeling of site effects, i.e. of the local amplification of the response of the ground to seismic excitation. The study of such effects is an important observation in urban areas to be able to anticipate the damage to constructions and, if necessary, to plan the organization of search and rescue operations. It is also a significant element of the definition of paraseismic standards. Site effects can be determined experimentally, but that requires the installation of stations for a sufficient period of time to record a few tens of seismic events. Numerical modeling makes it possible to avoid this often long and difficult experimentation, assuming of course that one has good knowledge of the geological structure of the subsurface in the studied area. We thus propose in the Magique-3D project to use the numerical techniques mentioned above for instance to quantify the effects of topographic variations in the structure.