Our homes and offices are only as solid as the ground beneath them.
Our homes and offices are only as solid as the ground beneath them. When that solid ground turns to liquid — as sometimes happens during earthquakes — it can topple buildings and bridges. This phenomenon is known as liquefaction, and it was a major feature of the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, a magnitude 6.3 quake that killed 185 people and destroyed thousands of homes.
An upside of the Christchurch quake was that it was one of the most well-documented in history. Because New Zealand is seismically active, the city was instrumented with numerous sensors for monitoring earthquakes. Post-event reconnaissance provided a wealth of additional data on how the soil responded across the city.
"It's an enormous amount of data for our field," said post-doctoral researcher, Maria Giovanna Durante, a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow previously of The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). "We said, ‘If we have thousands of data points, maybe we can find a trend.'"
Read more at: University of Texas at Austin
Sink holes and liquefaction on roads in Christchurch, New Zealand after 2011 earthquake. (Photo Credit: Martin Luff, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
