November 2, 2023 - Cascadia CoPes Hub / RCN Monthly Seminar Series

Looking Forward and Backward at Soil Liquefaction in the Cascadia Subduction Zone

Speaker: Brett Maurer

 Abstract: Among the many impacts worthy of investigation in CSZ earthquakes, the most economically consequential could potentially be soil liquefaction, which routinely damages an array of infrastructure, including buried lifelines, buildings, port structures, roads, levees, and bridges. And, because liquefaction threatens mobility across all modes of transportation, it can severely hinder response and recovery. Additionally, liquefaction is notable for its potential to “ground truth” ground-motion predictions, given that its presence or absence in the geologic record can provide constraint on the intensities of shaking in past events. It is thus an important phenomenon, both looking forward for damage prediction and looking backward to constrain the characteristics of past earthquakes. Join us as we introduce this CoPes Pilot Project to better understand soil liquefaction in the CSZ. This presentation will summarize: (i) new predictions of liquefaction in M9 events using test data from discrete, regionally distributed sites; (ii) ongoing efforts to bridge these predictions across data-scarce domains using AI; and (iii) what, if anything, relic liquefaction can tell us about regional ground-motion intensity patterns in past CSZ ruptures.

Bio:  Brett Maurer is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington. Maurer received BS and MS degrees from Syracuse University and a PhD from Virginia Tech. He teaches and conducts research on soil dynamics and geotechnical earthquake engineering, focusing on problems at the intersection of data science and geotechnics.