Egill Hauksson
Research Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus
Research Overview
Seismotectonics; state of stress in the crust; stress triggering of earthquakes; crustal tomography; seismicity studies; instrumentation and software for real-time earthquake monitoring.
Goal: Understanding all aspects of earthquakes
Using large regional earthquake datasets to study, seismotectonics, earthquake statistics, earthquake source processes, and image the Earth's crustal structure.
Examples of current research
- Tectonic and seismicity analysis of the 1857 Mw7.9 Fort Tejon earthquake
- Synthesizing the time-space behavior of earthquake sequences in the Salton Trough
- Exploring the relationship between crustal geophysics and the properties of seismicity in southern California
- Mapping the 3-D tectonic crustal stress field and style of faulting along the Pacific North America plate boundary in southern California
Why it matters
Earthquakes are both a fascinating and terrifying natural phenomena. Unprecedented large datasets are being gathered to study them, their faults, and their potentially damaging effects. To make progress towards the ultimate goal of earthquake prediction, we seek to mine these datasets for the physical processes that initiate, and drive earthquake rupture for possibly distances of 1OOs of miles, like in the 1857 Mw7.9 Fort Tejon earthquake.
Figure Caption
Southern California seismicity from 1981 through 2022 recorded by the Caltech Southern California Seismic Network. The more than 670,000 high-quality waveform-relocated hypocenters are shown as black dots, and earthquakes of magnitude greater or equal to 5.5 are shown as red stars. Active faults since the Late Quaternary are shown as magenta colored curves. The large mainshock aftershock earthquake sequences are indicated by their year: 1992 Mw7.3 Landers; 1994 Mw6.7 Northridge; 1999 Mw7.1 Hector Mine; 2010 Mw7.2 El Mayor-Cucapah; 2019 Mw7.1 Ridgecrest. This unique and always growing data set is used for studying earthquake statistics and source physics, as well as seismotectonics or the relations between the seismicity and mapped late Quaternary faults. (Hauksson et al., 2019).