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Earthquake
Causes of earthquakes

GEOLOGY

Effects of BY:
earthquakes
WRITTEN Bruce A. Bolt
Surface forces
Natural phenomena

Tsunamis
Arti cial induction
Alternative Title: earth tremor
Seiches

Earthquake, any sudden

Intensity and magnitude of shaking of the ground caused by the passage of seismic waves through Earth’s rocks. Seismic waves are
earthquakes
produced when some form of energy stored in Earth’s crust is suddenly released, usually when masses of rock straining against
Intensity scales
one another suddenly fracture and “slip.” Earthquakes occur most often along geologic faults, narrow zones where rock masses
Earthquake magnitude
move in relation to one another. The major fault lines of the world are located at the fringes of the huge tectonic plates that make
Earthquake energy
up Earth’s crust. (See the table of major earthquakes.)
Frequency

Occurrence of earthquakes
Tectonic associations

Shallow, intermediate, and deep foci

Aftershocks, foreshocks, and swarms

The study of earthquakes

Seismic waves
Principal types of seismic waves

Properties of seismic waves

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Observation of earthquakes
Earthquake observatories

Locating earthquake
Measurement epicentres
of seismic waves

Earthquake prediction
Observation and interpretation of
precursory phenomena 

Building knocked off its foundation by the January 1995 earthquake in Kōbe, Japan.
Exploration of the Earth’s interior Dr. Roger Hutchison/NGDC
with seismic waves
Methods of reducing earthquake
Seismological tomography
Little was understood about earthquakes until the emergence of seismology at the beginning of the 20th century. Seismology,
hazards
Structure of the Earth’s interior
which involves the scienti c study of all aspects of earthquakes, has yielded answers to such long-standing questions as why and
Long-period oscillations of the globe
how earthquakes occur.
Extraterrestrial seismic

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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

About 50,000 earthquakes large enough to be noticed without the aid of instruments occur annually over the entire Earth. Of
these, approximately 100 are of suf cient size to produce substantial damage if their centres are near areas of habitation. Very great
earthquakes occur on average about once per year. Over the centuries they have been responsible for millions of deaths and an
incalculable amount of damage to property.

Crowds watching the res set off by the earthquake in San Francisco in 1906, photo by Arnold Genthe.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The Nature Of Earthquakes

Causes of earthquakes
Earth’s major earthquakes occur mainly in belts coinciding with the margins of tectonic plates. This has long been apparent from
early catalogs of felt earthquakes and is even more readily discernible in modern seismicity maps, which show instrumentally
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determined epicentres. The most important earthquake belt is the Circum-Paci c Belt, which affects many populated coastal

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regions around the Paci c Ocean—for example, those of New Zealand, New Guinea, Japan, the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and the
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western coasts of North and South America. It is estimated that 80 percent of the energy presently released in earthquakes comes
from those whose epicentres are in this belt. The seismic activity is by no means uniform throughout the belt, and there are a
number of branches at various points. Because at many places the Circum-Paci c Belt is associated with volcanic activity, it has
been popularly dubbed the “Paci c Ring of Fire.”

A second belt, known as the Alpide Belt, passes through the Mediterranean region eastward through Asia and joins the Circum-
Paci c Belt in the East Indies. The energy released in earthquakes from this belt is about 15 percent of the world total. There also
are striking connected belts of seismic activity, mainly along oceanic ridges—including those in the Arctic Ocean, the Atlantic
Ocean, and the western Indian Ocean—and along the rift valleys of East Africa. This global seismicity distribution is best
understood in terms of its plate tectonic setting.

Natural forces
Earthquakes are caused by the sudden release of energy within some limited region of the rocks of the Earth. The energy can be
released by elastic strain, gravity, chemical reactions, or even the motion of massive bodies. Of all these the release of elastic strain
is the most important cause, because this form of energy is the only kind that can be stored in suf cient quantity in the Earth to
produce major disturbances. Earthquakes associated with this type of energy release are called tectonic earthquakes.

Tectonics
Tectonic earthquakes are explained by the so-called elastic rebound theory, formulated by the American geologist Harry Fielding
Reid after the San Andreas Fault ruptured in 1906, generating the great San Francisco earthquake. According to the theory, a
tectonic earthquake occurs when strains in rock masses have accumulated to a point where the resulting stresses exceed the
strength of the rocks, and sudden fracturing results. The fractures propagate rapidly through the rock, usually tending in the same
direction and sometimes extending many kilometres along a local zone of weakness. In 1906, for instance, the San Andreas Fault
slipped along a plane 430 km (270 miles) long. Along this line the ground was displaced horizontally as much as 6 metres (20 feet).

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earthquakes: causes
Earthquakes are caused by a sudden fracture of rock masses along a fault line.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

As a fault rupture progresses along or up the fault, rock masses are ung in opposite directions and thus spring back to a position
where there is less strain. At any one point this movement may take place not at once but rather in irregular steps; these sudden
slowings and restartings give rise to the vibrations that propagate as seismic waves. Such irregular properties of fault rupture are
now included in the modeling of earthquake sources, both physically and mathematically. Roughnesses along the fault are
referred to as asperities, and places where the rupture slows or stops are said to be fault barriers. Fault rupture starts at the
earthquake focus, a spot that in many cases is close to 5–15 km under the surface. The rupture propagates in one or both directions
over the fault plane until stopped or slowed at a barrier. Sometimes, instead of being stopped at the barrier, the fault rupture
recommences on the far side; at other times the stresses in the rocks break the barrier, and the rupture continues.

Earthquakes have different properties depending on the type of fault slip that causes them (as shown in the gure). The usual fault
model has a “strike” (that is, the direction from north taken by a horizontal line in the fault plane) and a “dip” (the angle from the
horizontal shown by the steepest slope in the fault). The lower wall of an inclined fault is called the footwall. Lying over the footwall
is the hanging wall. When rock masses slip past each other parallel to the strike, the movement is known as strike-slip faulting.
Movement parallel to the dip is called dip-slip faulting. Strike-slip faults are right lateral or left lateral, depending on whether the
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block on the opposite side of the fault from an observer has moved to the right or left. In dip-slip faults, if the hanging-wall block

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moves downward relative to the footwall block, it is called “normal” faulting; the opposite motion, with the hanging wall moving
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upward relative to the footwall, produces reverse or thrust faulting.
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Types of faulting in tectonic earthquakesIn normal and reverse faulting, rock masses slip vertically past each other. In strike-slip faulting, the rocks slip past each
other horizontally.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

All known faults are assumed to have been the seat of one or more earthquakes in the past, though tectonic movements along
faults are often slow, and most geologically ancient faults are now aseismic (that is, they no longer cause earthquakes). The actual
faulting associated with an earthquake may be complex, and it is often not clear whether in a particular earthquake the total
energy issues from a single fault plane.

Observed geologic faults sometimes show relative displacements on the order of hundreds of kilometres over geologic time,
whereas the sudden slip offsets that produce seismic waves may range from only several centimetres to tens of metres. In the 1976
Tangshan earthquake, for example, a surface strike-slip of about one metre was observed along the causative fault east of Beijing,
and in the 1999 Taiwan earthquake the Chelung-pu fault slipped up to eight metres vertically.

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Volcanism 

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 Asia: Water resources

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83 REFERENCES FOUND IN BRITANNICA ARTICLES

Assorted References

aftershocks
(In aftershock)

association with volcanic eruptions

(In volcano)

infrasonic waves
(In infrasonics)

(In infrasonics)

internal structure of Earth

(In Earth exploration: Seismic refraction methods)

(In Earth exploration: Conclusions about the deep Earth)

prediction and control

(In seismograph)

(In geology: Earthquake prediction and control)

soil liquefaction
(In soil liquefaction)

caused by

dams
(In Asia: Water resources)

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