A recent swarm of small shallow earthquakes in Mexico City in 2019 and 2023 caused surprisingly strong ground shaking, prompting researchers to wonder how shaking from a moderate sized earthquake might impact buildings across the city.
A recent swarm of small shallow earthquakes in Mexico City in 2019 and 2023 caused surprisingly strong ground shaking, prompting researchers to wonder how shaking from a moderate sized earthquake might impact buildings across the city.
In the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, Miguel Jaimes and Gerardo Suárez at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México describe potential damage forecasts from ground shaking scenarios for moderate earthquakes in three regions of the Mexico City basin.
The three locations of the modeled earthquakes were based on recent seismic events: a 2023 earthquake in La Magdalena Contreras, the 2018 San Juan de Aragón earthquake, and the 1995 Milpa Alta and 1985 Juchitepec earthquakes.
Their model earthquakes, up to magnitude 5.5, produced ground shaking that led to different amounts of damaged buildings, with the extent of the damage depending on the region’s underlying geology, Jaimes and Suárez concluded.
Read more at Seismological Society of America
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