← Back to Sessions

The Great Alaska Inventory: A Digital Compilation of Ground Failures Triggered by the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake

Description: 

The M9.2 1964 Great Alaska earthquake is the second largest earthquake in the historical record, involved nearly five minutes of shaking, and generated deep and shallow landsliding and widespread liquefaction over an area exceeding 200,000 km². This important event has been extensively studied, yet no digital compilation of ground failures from the event exists. Data from consequential historic events like the Great Alaska Earthquake are valuable not only for understanding the extent of impacts, but also for improving the accuracy of predictive ground failure models. Ground failure data from historic events are not often digitized and are therefore relatively inaccessible for quantitative analyses. Herein, we present a digital compilation of about 1500 published ground failure observations from the 1964 earthquake, merged into a single inventory with comprehensive metadata reported as feature attributes. We also examined how the observed ground failure data compare to current ground failure models of this event. The largest challenges with this effort were in handling large uncertainties in the feature locations and in the variability of the data quality. To address these issues, we compared the published information to historical topographic maps and local records. We also included attribute fields to delineate different types of data and their accuracy, such as maps of different scales and/or detail. These attributes were essential for understanding the limitations of the dataset and for using these observations appropriately in model development and/or assessment. We encourage their use in future inventories. Our new consolidated inventory will contribute to the USGS repository of earthquake-triggered ground failure inventories.

Session: Coseismic Ground Failure: Advances in Modeling, Impacts and Communication

Type: Oral

Date: 4/20/2023

Presentation Time: 11:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Sonia M. Ellison

Student Presenter: No

Invited Presentation: 

Authors