Glossary

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Active fault: A fault along which slip has occurred, variously in historical, Holocene, or Quaternary time, or earthquake foci are located.

Amplitude (wave): The maximum height of a wave crest or depth of a trough.

Aseismic region: One that is almost free from earthquakes.

Asperites (fault): Roughness on the fault surface subject to slip.

Attenuation: The reduction in amplitude of a wave with time or distance traveled.

Body wave: A seismic wave that travels through the interior of an elastic material.

Body wave magnitude: The magnitude of an earthquake estimated from the amplitude of body waves.

Core (of Earth): The central part of the Earth below a depth of 2900 kilometers. It is thought to be composed of iron and silicates and to be molten on the outside with a solid central part.

Creep (Slow-fault slip): Slow slip occurring along the fault, without producing earthquakes.

Crust (of Earth): The outermost rocky shell.

Damping: Loss of energy in wave motion due to transfer into heat by frictional forces.

Dip: The angle by which a rock layer or fault plane deviates from the horizontal.

Earthquake: The vibrations of the Earth caused by the passage of seismic waves radiating from some source of elastic energy.

Earthquake occurrence (recurrence) interval: The average time between the occurrences of earthquakes in a particular region.

Epicenter: The point on the Earth’s surface directly above the focus (or hypocenter) of an earthquake

Fault: A fracture or zone of fractures in rock along which the two sides have been displaced relative to each other parallel to the fracture. The total fault offset may range from centimeters to kilometers.

Fault plane: The plane that most closely coincides with the rupture surface of a fault.

Foreshocks: Smaller earthquakes preceding the largest earthquake of a series concentrated in a restricted crystal volume.

Frequency: Number of oscillations per unit time; in Hertz (Hz) i.e., 1 cycle per second.

Gouge: The crushed, sheared, and powdered rock altered to clay.

Holocene: About 10,000 years before the present.

Intensity (of earthquake): A measure of ground shaking obtained from the damage done to structures built by humans.

Mantle (of Earth): The main bulk of the Earth, between the crust and core, ranging from depths of about 40 to 3470 kilometers. It is composed of dense silicate rocks and divided into a number of concentric shells.

Microseism: Weak, almost continuos background seismic waves or Earth noise that can be detected only by seismographs often caused by surf, ocean waves, wind, or human activity.

Origin time: The time of initiation of the seismic waves at earthquake source in U.T

Period (of wave): The time interval between successive crests in a sinusoidal wave train; the period is the inverse of the frequency of a cyclic event.

Plate tectonics: A geological model in which the Earth’s crust and uppermost mantle are divided into a number of more-or-less rigid segments.

Precursor: A change in the geological conditions that is a forerunner to earthquake generation on a fault.

Quaternary: About 2 million years before the present.

P wave: The primary wave or fastest wave travelling away from a seismic event through the rock and consisting of a train of compressions and dilatations of the material.

Probability: The number of cases that actually occur divided by the total number of cases possible.

Resonance: The largest vibration of a mechanical system (such as a soil layer) due to enhancement of the energy at a frequency special to that system.

Risk (Seismic): The relative risk is the comparative earthquake hazard from one site to another. The probabilistic risk is the odds of earthquake occurrence within a given time interval and region.

Seismic Wave: An elastic wave in the Earth usually generated by an earthquake source or explosion.

Seismicity: The occurrence of earthquakes in space and time.

Seismology: The study of earthquakes, seismic sources, and wave propagation through the Earth.

Slip: The relative motion of one face of a fault relative to the other.

Strain: The geometrical deformation or change in shape of a body. The change in an angle, length, area, or volume divided by the original value.

Stress: A measure of the forces acting on a body in units of force per unit area.

Surface waves: Seismic waves that follow the Earth’s surface only, with a speed less than that of S waves.

S Waves: The secondary seismic wave, travelling more slowly than the P wave and consisting of elastic vibrations transverse to the direction of travel.It cannot propagate in a liquid.

Tectonic Earthquakes: Earthquakes resulting from sudden release of energy stored by major deformation of the Earth.

Tectonics: Large-scale deformation of the outer part of the Earth.

Earthquake energy: The maximum eneregy is generated by slipping of the fault multiflied by the volume of the rock under accerelation. A table has been prepared by Dr. B.Ramalingeswara Rao, Sr.Scientist, to compare all the energy calculations to compare them instantly and also know more about the thousands of times higher to the next unit in certain places in the Table given below

Table : Earthquake Energy Release Formulae:

Table : Log E=9.0+1.8M, Log E=5.8+2.4mb, Log E=1.9Md+0.024(Md)*2

S.No Magnitude mb M Md
4.0  2.51E+15  1.58E+16  7.66E+17   
4.1  4.37E+15  2.4E+16  1.24E+18 
4.2  7.59E+15  3.63E+16  2.01E+18 
4.3  1.32E+16  5.5E+16  3.26E+18 
4.4  2.29E+16 8.32E+16  5.3E+18 
4.5  3.98E+16  1.26E+17  8.63E+18 
4.6  6.92E+16  1.91E+17  1.41E+19 
4.7  1.2E+17  2.88E+19  2.29E+18 
4.8  2.09E+17  4.37E+17  3.74E+19 
10  4.9  3.63E+17  6.61E+17  6.11E+19 
11  5.0  6.31E+17  1E+18  E+20 
12  5.1  1.1E+18  1.51E+18  1.64E+20 
13  5.2  1.91E+18  2.29E+18  2.69E+20 
14  5.3  3.31E+18  3.47E+18  4.41E+20 
15  5.4  5.75E+18  5.25E+18  7.24E+20 
16  5.5  1.0E+19  7.94E+18  1.19E+21 
17  5.6  1.74E+19  1.2E+19  1.96E+21 
18  5.7  3.02E+19  1.82E+19  3.23E+21 
19  5.8  5.25E+19  2.75E+19  5.34E+21 
20  5.9  9.12E+19  4.17E+19  8.82E+21 
21  6.0  1.58E+20  6.31E+19  1.46E+22 
22  6.1  2.75E+20  9.55E+19  2.42E+22 
23  6.2  4.79E+20  1.45E+20  4.0E+22 
24  6.3  8.32E+20  2.19E+20  6.65E+22 
25  6.4  1.45E+21  3.31E+20  1.1E+23 
26  6.5  2.51E+21  5.01E+20  1.84E+23 
27  6.6  4.37E+21  7.59E+20  3.06E+23 
28  6.7  7.59E+21  1.15E+21  5.1E+23 
29  6.8  1.32E+22  1.74E+21  8.51E+23 
30  6.9  2.29E+22  2.63E+21  1.42E+24 
31  7.0  3.98E+22  3.98E+21  2.38E+24 
32  7.1  6.92E+22  6.03E+21  3.98E+24 
33  7.2  1.2E+23  9.12E+21  6.67E+24 
34  7.3  2.09E+23  1.38E+22  1.12E+25 
35  7.4  3.63E+23  2.089+22  1.88E+25 
36  7.5  6.31E+23  3.16E+22  3.16E+25 
37  7.6  1.1E+24  4.79E+22  5.32E+25 
38  7.7  1.91E+24  7.24E+22  8.97E+25 
39  7.8  3.31E+24  1.1E+23  1.51E+26 
40  7.9  5.75E+24  1.66E+23  2.56E+26 
41  8.0  1.0E+25  2.51E+23  4.33E+26 
ABBREVIATIONS

  ASCII	  American Standard Code for Information Interchange
  BMP	  Bitmaps (Windows)
  CAD	  Computer Aided Design
  CASE	  Computer Aided Software Engineering
  CBG	  Central Board of Geophysics
  CD-R	  Compact Disc – Recordable
  CSIR	  Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
  DBMS	  Database Management System
  DES	  Data Encryption Standard
  DOS	  Disk Operating System
  EPC	  Epicenter.
  EDF	  Earthquake Data Format
  GIF	  Graphical Interchange Format
  G.M.T	  Greenwich Mean Time
  GPS	  Global Positioning Systems
  GUI	  Graphical User Interface
  HTML	  Hypertext Markup Language
  IBM	  International Business Machine
  IDE	  Integrated Development Environment
  ISO	  International Standards Organization.
  JFC	  Java Foundation Classes
  JPEG	  Joint Photographers Effort Group
  KB	  Kilobytes
  LAN	  Local Area Network
  MB	  Megabytes
  MDI	  Multiple Document Interface
  MIS	  Management Information System
  MS-DOS	Microsoft Disk operating System.
  NGDC	  National Geophysical Data Center
  NEIC	  National Earthquake Information Center
  NOAA	  National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration
  NGRI	  National Geophysical Research Institute
  OOP	  Object Oriented Programming
  PC	  Personal Computer
  PDF	  Portable Document Format
  RAM	  Random Access Memory
  SDLC	  System Development Life Cycle
  U.T	  Universal Time
  U.S.G.S	  United States Geological Surveys
  WWW	  World Wide Web
  WYSIWYG	  What you see is what you get!