A Study of Earthquake Science

Abstract

After an extended period of study, the National Research Council's Committee on the Science of Earthquakes has finally released its report, Living on an Active Earth: Perspectives on Earthquake Science . As the chairman of the committee that produced the report, I hope it will be effective in documenting the marvelous progress made in earthquake research and in helping scientists and their supporting agencies set a vigorous research agenda for the years ahead. I have to admit, however, that digesting this tome—more than 400 pages long and hardly the type of book one hauls to the beach—could be a challenge. So I jumped at the opportunity offered by the SRL editor to summarize some aspects of the report and salt in a few personal perspectives. The NRC study was motivated by questions surrounding the effectiveness of the “knowledge based” strategy taken by the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program. The NRC study was motivated by questions surrounding the effectiveness of the “knowledge based” strategy taken by the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program (NEHRP), the mainstay of federal earthquake research since 1977. A series of critiques in the early to mid-1990's, including a 1995 report by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment titled Reducing Earthquake Losses , concluded that the NEHRP approach short-changed practical measures for mitigating earthquake losses, creating an “implementation gap” in which risk-reduction efforts lagged far behind the knowledge base created by basic research. I was chairman of the NRC Committee on Seismology at the time, and it seemed to us that, while everyone could get behind a more vigorous program to implement research, the implication that the $100 million per year allocated to NEHRP—a small budget for a vast problem—would be better spent on short-term mitigation efforts was misguided. Missing from the NEHRP debate was an appreciation of …