2024 EERI Annual Meeting (2024AM)

Geotechnical Engineering

Earthquake-induced soil liquefaction and landslides have caused tremendous damage in past earthquakes and continue to pose substantial risk to critical infrastructure. Assessing these types of geohazards is an important component to a wide range of engineering applications, ranging from site-specific analyses of ground failure potential using geotechnical subsurface data, to broader regional-scale ground failure analysis of near-real time earthquake impacts or longer-term portfolio risk. Characterizing earthquake geohazards is complicated by uncertainties in all aspects of the problem, including (1) identifying hazard-susceptible geomaterials and characterizing their spatial extent and engineering properties, (2) constraining variability in groundwater conditions, (3) estimating earthquake ground motions, and (4) linking ground failure severity to system damage and loss. While these challenges are certainly present in site-specific applications, they are magnified substantially as barriers to more comprehensive regional-scale assessments.

Nonetheless, substantial progress has been made in the past 15-20 years in regional-scale modeling of earthquake geohazards, with the development of more geostatistics-based methods focused on blending site-specific geotechnical data with geospatial data and geologic mapping, regional groundwater modeling, probabilistic seismic hazard and ground motion assessments, and probabilistic modeling of landslides and liquefaction. This special session will consist of presentations from six leading researchers in the field of regional-scale modeling of earthquake geohazards, followed by a 30-minute Q&A and panel discussion with the speakers. The session will focus on specific issues such as (1) current and future applications and case studies of geohazard modeling at scale (e.g., near-real time situational awareness, scenario impact studies, long-term term risk assessments), (2) incorporation of data at different scales, ranging from geospatial information to subsurface geotechnical data, (3) geohazard modeling methodologies for both data-rich and data-sparse regions, (4) integration into multi-hazard assessments, and (5) extensions to damage and loss estimation.