November 18, 2008
AMEC Geomatrix Earthquake Expert Designs Cover of Nature Geoscience
OAKLAND, CA – Serkan Bozkurt, a Geographic Information System (GIS) specialist in 3D visualizations and modeling for earthquake research with AMEC Geomatrix, designed the cover image for the November issue of Nature Geoscience, a monthly, multi-disciplinary journal committed to publishing significant, high-quality research in the Earth Sciences.
Serkan and his teammates at the Active Fault Research Center (AFRC) Japan and United States Geological Survey (USGS) authored a paper titled “A Slab Fragment Wedged Under Tokyo and Its Tectonic and Seismic Implications” in this journal. Their paper was also featured in the News and Views portion of the journal.
The journal’s cover image depicts a digital elevation model showing Tokyo’s offshore bathymetry and topography and the tectonic triple junction between Pacific, Philippine Sea and Eurasian plates. In addition to the paper, Serkan and his team produced a 5-minute narrated movie in which the viewer flies through the earthquakes as they are rotated, spun, and interpreted. An abstract of the paper, GIS visualizations, and animations are available at http://sicarius.wr.usgs.gov/fragment/.
To reinterpret the features of the descending plate ‘slabs’ on which the large earthquakes strike, Serkan Bozkurt and his colleagues examined 300,000 earthquake hypocenters in a 3D GIS-based virtual reality platform, and carried out a tomographic ‘brain scan’ of the slabs. The authors found a distinct 25-km thick and 100-km wide (15 x 60 mi) body beneath the Kanto basin that has previously been considered to be part of the Philippine Sea slab by the scientific community. This publication finds several of the body’s characteristics such as the speed of seismic waves that pass through it, and the presence and type of microearthquakes that surround it.
Tokyo lies between a volcanic front and the sea. The 400-year-old capital city and the surrounding Kanto plain are home to one-quarter of Japan’s population. The region was shaken by destructive earthquakes in 1703, 1855 and 1923, the last of which claimed 105,000 lives; reoccurrence of any of these today is expected to cost about $1 trillion (100 trillion Yen). Just 300 km (200 mi) northwest of Tokyo lies an undersea ‘triple junction’, where three of the two dozen or so moving tectonic plates that comprise the earth’s surface meet. Tokyo sits atop the Eurasian plate; beneath it, the Philippine Sea plate descends (or ‘subducts’) from the south, and the Pacific plate subducts from the east. Subduction is not steady but instead occurs in a stick-slip manner that gives rise to infrequent great earthquakes.
For more information, please contact:
Marion T. Thatch, FSMPS, CPSM
510.663.4128
marion.thatch@amec.com