New Center at USC to Map Out Quake Hazards

A new earthquake center is being established in Los Angeles to focus and integrate research throughout Southern California as part of a program that should lead to the creation of precise maps that will define the seismic hazards for every neighborhood.

The Southern California Earthquake Center, headquartered at USC, will bring at least $5 million in new federal research money to this region each year.

The center is designed to give scientists a comprehensive understanding of the faults and geological conditions that threaten Southern California, and to make that information available to researchers and the community.

Creation of the center, which is expected to fill a major void in earthquake research, is being announced today by representatives of the universities and government agencies that are participating in the program. Funded mainly by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey, the center will also focus on earthquake predictions and fund some creative research projects that are considered too experimental for traditional grants.

Participants include the NSF, USGS, Caltech, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, the state of California and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory.

The center will address a different need than the National Center for Earthquake Engineering, which the NSF awarded to the State University of New York in 1986--to the consternation of California scientists who thought it logically belonged here in the nation’s earthquake capital. The New York center is concerned with the design of structures and how they perform during earthquakes.

The new center will concentrate on the geological processes that cause earthquakes, and the entire program will be aimed at one region--Southern California.

The fundamental purpose of the center will be to generate a “master model” of how the various geological forces interact in Southern California. This will provide the scientific basis for determining the seismic risk for all areas, according to Keiiti Aki, professor of geology at USC and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, who will serve as science director of the center.

“The goal of the center is to improve our ability to make earthquake predictions in Southern California,” said Thomas Henyey, chairman of the USC geology department and executive director of the new center. “Not only for when and where earthquakes might occur, but also to predict the nature of the ground motions that will result from these earthquakes.”

In addition, the center will expand an earthquake data bank now maintained by the Geological Survey’s Pasadena office and Caltech.

“We’re going to enhance that operation, and add additional data, and it will be made accessible to people who need the information,” Henyey said.

Aiding in that effort will be $2 million this year in “new money” from the Geological Survey, said Thomas Heaton, director of USGS’s Pasadena office and one of the principal figures in the new center. The new funds “represent a tremendously needed increase in funding,” Heaton said.

Creation of a comprehensive model for Southern California should improve the ability of scientists to determine when seismic events--such as small quakes or deformation of the Earth’s crust--point toward an approaching danger, such as a great quake. To use that information effectively, scientists must understand how an earthquake will affect local areas, because the nature of the soils beneath a building largely determines how it will fare during an earthquake.

It would be useful to know the likelihood that any particular fault will rupture any time soon, according to Aki and Henyey.

Scientists have been frustrated in their efforts to predict earthquakes because the forces that create temblors are extremely complex and no one is certain exactly which seismic events occur before any quake. In recent years, researchers have virtually abandoned the hope of issuing warnings of when and where the next quake will occur, but they have high hopes of developing a system that would allow them to estimate the probability that a fault will erupt over a given period.

That has already been achieved in some isolated cases. Scientists have predicted that there is at least a 50-50 chance that the San Andreas Fault will erupt in Southern California during the next 30 years. The new center hopes to develop the kind of understanding of the seismic forces in Southern California that would permit scientists to say which faults are most likely to rupture within a few years. That would at least give officials time to prepare for the quakes, but that is probably several years away, most experts believe.

The California Division of Mines and Geology, which is participating in the center, expects to use data generated by the project to prepare maps that will reveal the seismic hazards of the entire region. “Our hope is to get very site-specific,” Henyey said.

Much of the needed information is already available, but it must be collected and archived so that researchers can find it, and that is one of the main goals of the center. It also expects to fund innovative research. None of the money will go into buildings and facilities, Henyey said.

Aki, a longtime leader in the effort to predict earthquakes, believes that the center will turn the tide toward more aggressive and creative research.

“For the past 10 years the funding level has been almost flat, so the real dollars have been declining for 10 years,” he said. “Many very interesting ideas came up (during that period) and they had to compete for the limited funding.”

As a result, grants have been awarded primarily to safe projects that promised almost certain returns. Funding for such things as predicting earthquakes, which some scientists believe may never be possible, “has been suppressed,” Aki said.

“Funding for earthquake prediction has been declining steadily, almost disappearing,” he said. “I was very concerned about that.”

The center will be funded for at least five to 10 years, Henyey said, so it will be possible to fund some risky projects that do not promise immediate returns.

The center will also be able to fund research tailored to close the information gaps in the master model that it plans to create.