Unstably balanced rocks provide clues about future earthquake hazards

Unstably balanced rocks, or PBRs as they are known in geological circles, are ancient, finely balanced natural formations that can provide scientists with interesting clues about earthquake hazards in the region. By understanding the upper limits of the oscillation these rocks have endured in the past, researchers can get a picture of future earthquake hazards in the region, and a new advanced technology can greatly improve the accuracy of this modeling.

Scientists have turned to PBRs to assess seismic activity and future earthquake hazards for decades, with long-term formations serving as evidence of the limits of tremors that have occurred locally over the preceding millennia. This information, along with other factors such as fault lines, feeds into the earthquake risk modeling that engineers rely on when settling into safe sites to build bridge dams.

But there are many loopholes in this approach, and one of the big loopholes concerns the lack of seismic data for rare earthquakes larger in size between 10,000 and 1,000,000 years ago. A team at Imperial College London has come up with a way that could fill in these vacuums, by studying ancient geological secrets of a group of PBRs in California.

This involved using a technique called surface exposure to the universe, which dates back to calculating the amount of rare beryllium atoms within rocks that result from long-term exposure to cosmic rays. This enabled the team to determine how long the PBRs had been in their current arrangement, and to use 3D modeling software to recreate those rocks and simulate the amount of ground shaking it would have taken to fall.

A team at Imperial College London found that unstable equilibrium rocks can exist in the landscape twice longer than previously assumed.

Anna Rudd and Dylan Rudd, Imperial College London

The team found that PBRs can be present in landscapes twice as previously assumed. The new data has been combined and compared with existing models as a way to improve its accuracy. According to the team, it helped them remove a set of assumptions in modeling and ultimately reduced uncertainty in earthquake risk estimates by 49 percent, and reduced the average size of rare earthquakes, which are estimated to occur every 10,000 years, by 27 percent.

“We are teetering on the edge of a breakthrough in the science of earthquake prediction,” says Dr Dylan Rudd, co-author of the study. Our “rock clock” technologies have the potential to save huge costs in seismic engineering and can be used to test and update site-specific risk estimates for earthquake-prone areas – particularly in coastal areas where controlled earthquake sources are inherently more difficult to investigate.

Researchers are now turning their attention to improving risk estimates in Southern California, which is a densely populated part of the United States and one that is particularly at risk of seismic activity.

“We are now looking at PBRs near major earthquake faults like the San Andreas Fault near Los Angeles,” says Anna Rudd, lead author of the study. “We are also looking at how to determine the data – whether it is fault slip rates or the choice of equations of Earth’s vibration – that skew the results in the original risk models. This way we can improve scientists’ understanding of large earthquakes even further.”

The research has been published in the journal AGU Advances.

Source: Imperial College London

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