The recent earthquake in Haiti highlights the tremendous suffering that earthquakes can inflict on some of the world's most vulnerable communities. While the role of earthquake engineering is of paramount importance in mitigating these effects, before we can improve our building standards it is absolutely crucial to gather first hand information on current building deficiencies. This research will fund UK based academics to participate in earthquake field investigations conducted by the Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT). in addition to this it will also enhance the quality of the data collected and its accessability to other researchers bydeveloping standardised field data collection methods. The grant will lasts for five years and in this time we will conduct five field investigations. Each investigation will comprise of a team of approximately six to eight people, two of whom will be UK academics and up to two PhD students and four from industry. They will spend approximately 7 days in the field making observations and collecting data. On their return, this data will be analysed and the findings disseminated to researchers, professional engineers and the community at large. This funding will allow rapid deployment of field investigations and the possibility to carry out longitudinal studies to assess recovery from catastrophic events. The grant will also provide funding for meetings with International partner institutions that deploy earthquake field missions (namely EERI, and GNS) in order to agree and develop standardised field mission protocols and data collection forms and tools.

This proposal is the UK component of a major international campaign, the Deep Fault Drilling Project (DFDP) to drill a series of holes into the Alpine Fault, New Zealand. The overarching aim of the DFDP to understand better the processes that lead to major earthquakes by taking cores and observing a major continental fault during its build up to a large seismic event. The next stage of this project will be to drill and instrument a 1.5 km hole into the Alpine Fault. Earthquakes are major geohazards. Although scientists can predict where on the Earth's surface earthquakes are most likely to occur, principally along plate boundaries, we have only imperfect knowledge. We also don't know when earthquakes will occur. This is well illustrated by recent events on the South Island of NZ. Two earthquakes in Christchurch in Sept 2010 and Feb 2011 caused 181 deaths and £7-10 billion of damage (~10% of NZ GDP). Yet Christchurch had previously been considered of relatively low seismic risk. In contrast, the western side of the South Island is defined by the Southern Alps, a major mountain chain (>3700 m) formed along the Australian-Pacific Plate boundary. Until a few million years ago this plate boundary was a strike-slip fault like the San Andreas Fault in California, but subtle changes in plate motion has led to the collision of the Pacific and Australian Plates. This caused uplift of the mountains and due to very high rates of rainfall and erosion, rapid exhumation of rocks that until recently had been deep within the Earth. Although these plates are moving past each other at ~30 mm/y and the uplift rate in the Southern Alps approaches 10 mm/y, there has not been a major earthquake along the Alpine Fault in NZ's, albeit short, written history. However, there is palaeo-seismic evidence that major earthquakes do occur along the Alpine Fault with magnitude ~8 earthquakes occurring every 200-400 years, with the latest event in 1717 AD. Earthquake occur because stresses build-up within the relatively strong brittle upper crust. At greater depths (>15 km) rocks can flow plastically and plates can move past each other without building up dangerous stresses. On some faults, the brittle crust "creeps" in numerous small micro-earthquake events and this inhibits the build up of stress. Unfortunately there are few even micro-earthquake events along the Alpine Fault or surface evidence for deformation, suggesting that the stresses along this plate boundary have been building up since 1717 - if that stress was released in a single earthquake it would result in a horizontal offset across the fault of >8m! A major hindrance to earthquake research is a lack of fault rock samples from the depths where stresses build up before an earthquake. Fault rocks exposed at the surface tend to be strongly altered. The strength of fault rocks will depend on a number of factors include pressure, temperature and the nature of the materials, but also whether there are geothermal fluids present. The geometry of the Alpine Fault is special in that the fault rocks that were recently deforming at depth within the crust are exposed close to the surface. Also because of rapid uplift and erosion the local geothermal gradients are high and relatively hot rocks are near the surface. This results in a relatively shallow depth (5-8 km) for the transition from brittle to plastic behaviour. This provides a unique opportunity to drill into the fault zone to recover cores of the fault, to undertake tests of the borehole strata, and to install within the borehole instruments to measure temperature, fluid pressures, and seismic activity. Once core samples are recovered we will perform geochemical and microstructural analyses on the fault rocks to understand the conditions at which they were deformed. We will subject them to geomechanical testing to see how changes in their environment affects the strength of the rocks and their ability to accommodate stresses before breaking.

The movement of large faults in the Earth's crust is controlled by the physical properties of the fault rocks: these are materials formed within the zone of fault movement. Earthquakes are generated in the top 10-20 km of the earth's crust (known as the seismogenic zone). The fault rocks in the seismogenic zone (brittle fault rocks) are formed by processes that produce material made up of lots of small particles that roll-around and slide past each other, with fluids playing an important role in controlling these processes. Understanding the physics of brittle fault rocks is crucial to understanding both the long-term movement of faults, on a time scale of millions of years, and to understanding the nucleation, rupture and cessation of large earthquakes. The Alpine Fault zone of New Zealand is a major plate-boundary fault that produces great earthquakes every 200-400 years. The fault movement involves a large component of dextral strike-slip - when one stands on one side of the fault the other side moves to the right (at about 35mm per year averaged over hundreds of thousands of years). It also involves reverse movement, so that the east side is sliding upwards and over the west side, at about 10 mm per year. There is a very-high rainfall on the west coast of the South Island and the uplifted material is eroded quickly so that the action of the fault over tens of thousands to millions of years is to bring materials from depth up to the Earth's surface. Materials from 10km get to the surface in a million years. What is unique about the Alpine Fault zone is that fault rocks at the surface have come from all depths in the fault zone and that equivalent fault rocks are being generated by the active fault today. We can sample brittle fault rocks at the surface that were formed at 5km depth and we can use geophysics (remote sensing into the Earth) to find out about what conditions exist today in the active fault at 5km depth, where equivalent fault rocks are being created. There is nowhere else where we can do this. In this proposal we aim to collect the first complete section of brittle fault rocks from the Alpine Fault zone and to use these to better understand the physics of processes in the seismogenic zone. The brittle fault rocks are often covered by river gravels and no complete section is exposed at the surface. So to collect the samples we plan to drill through about 150m of rock and collect cores from the drill hole. The core samples will be analysed in the laboratory so that we know their physical properties and can model better their behaviour on earthquake timescales and longer timescales. This project will involve significant international research collaboration and provides a stepping stone towards a more ambitious programme of deeper drilling and allied science supported by International Continental Drilling Programme. The ultimate goal is use the Alpine Fault Zone as a natural laboratory to understand the physics of rock deformation in the seismogenic zone and the physics of earthquake rupture.

CRUST takes advantage of the UK's leadership in uncertainty evaluation of earthquake source and ground motion (Goda [PI] and University of Bristol/Cabot Research Institute) and on-shore tsunami impact research (Rossetto [Co-I] and University College of London/EPICentre [Earthquake and People Interaction Centre]) to develop an innovative cross-hazard risk assessment methodology for cascading disasters that promotes dynamic decision-making processes for catastrophe risk management. It cuts across multiple academic fields, i.e. geophysics, engineering seismology, earthquake engineering, and coastal engineering. The timeliness and critical needs for cascading multi-hazards impact assessments have been exemplified by recent catastrophes. CRUST fills the current gap between quasi-static, fragmented approaches for multi-hazards and envisaged, dynamic, coherent frameworks for cascading hazards. CRUST combines a wide range of state-of-the-art hazard and risk models into a comprehensive methodology by taking into account uncertainty associated with predictions of hazards and risks. The work will provide multi-hazards risk assessment guidelines and tools for policy-makers and engineering/reinsurance industries. The proposal capitalises on a breakthrough technology for generating long-waves achieved by Rossetto. CRUST is composed of four work packages (WPs): WP1-'Ground shaking risk modelling due to mega-thrust subduction earthquakes'; WP2-'Tsunami wave and fragility modelling due to mega-thrust subduction earthquakes'; WP3-'Integrated multi-hazards modelling for earthquake shaking and tsunami'; and WP4-'Case studies for the Hikurangi and Cascadia subduction zones'. In WP1-WP3, the research adopts the 2011 Tohoku earthquake as a case study site, since this event offers extensive datasets for strong motion data, tsunami inundation, and building damage survey results, together with other geographical and demographical information (e.g. high-resolution bathymetry data and digital elevation model). The aims of WP1 are: to generate strong motion time-histories based on uncertain earthquake slips, reflecting multiple asperities (large slip patches) over a fault plane (WP1-1); to characterise spatiotemporal occurrence of aftershocks using global catalogues of subduction earthquakes (WP1-2); and to conduct probabilistic seismic performance assessment of structures subjected to mainshock-aftershock sequences (WP1-3). WP2 comprises tsunami wave profile and inundation simulation using uncertain earthquake slips (WP2-1); characterisation of tsunami loads to structures in coastal areas through large-scale physical experiments using an innovative long wave generation system at HR Wallingford (WP2-2); and development of analytical tsunami fragility models in comparison with field observations and experiments (WP2-3). The WP2 will be conducted in collaboration with academic collaborators from Kyoto University and Tohoku University (Japan). WP3 integrates the model components developed from WP1 and WP2 into a comprehensive framework for multi-hazards risk assessment for the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami (WP3-1). Then, practical engineering tools for the multi-hazards method will be developed in WP3-2. Finally, in WP4, the developed multi-hazards methodology will be applied to the Hikurangi and Cascadia subduction zones. The assessments are done in a predictive mode, and these case studies will be conducted in close collaboration with academic partners, GNS Science (New Zealand) for the Hikurangi zone, and researchers at Western University and University of British Columbia (Canada) for the Cascadia zone.

This project aims to develop a major international effort to create a Global Volcano Model (GVM) that provides systematic evidence, data and analysis of volcanic hazards and risk. The GVM project addresses hazards and risks on global, regional and local scales, and develops the capability to anticipate future volcanism and its consequences. The project builds on initiatives over the last several years to establish a global database of volcanic hazards (VOGRIPA) and to develop analysis and modelling tools to assess volcanic hazard and risk. The proposed GVM project also complements and interfaces with other major international initiatives, notably including the Global Volcanism Progamme of the Smithsonian Institution, WOVOdat (a database on precursors to volcanic eruptions), VHub (a US-led effort to develop an online collaborative environment for volcanology research and risk mitigation, including the development of more effective volcanic hazards models), the Volcano Observatory Best Practices Programme and the International Volcanic Health Hazards Network. The GVM project has parallels with the Global Earthquake Model in intention and scope of providing an authoritative source for assessing volcanic hazard and risk. There is a strong international consensus that GVM is an essential and timely undertaking. This project, which is within the natural hazards theme of NERC's strategy, provides a unique opportunity for the UK to play a leading role in a major international effort to address volcanic hazard and risk. There are 50 or so volcanic eruptions a year worldwide with approximately 20 ongoing at any one time. Increased global volcanic risk derives from factors that are increasing exposure and vulnerability, such as population growth, environmental degradation, urbanization, inequality and increasing independencies in a globalised world. There is also a decrease in societal resilience arising from the way society is organized and the increasing complexities of systems required to respond to emergencies, especially where impacts extend beyond national boundaries. The GVM project will develop an integrated global database system on volcanic hazards, vulnerability and exposure, make this globally accessible and crucially involve the international volcanological community and users in a partnership to design, develop, analyse and maintain the database system. The main hazards include: explosive eruptions, pyroclastic flows, lava domes, lava flows, lahars, tephra fall and ash dispersal, gas, flank collapse, debris flows and health hazards. New reliability indices and measures of uncertainty will be essential elements of the GVM. The GVM project will aim to establish new international metadata standards that will reduce ambiguity in the use of global volcanic datasets. Vulnerability and exposure data will be integrated into the GVM and again new methods of assessment and analysis will be investigated and tested. The integrated database system will be made available via an interactive web system with search engines using both spatial and text-based commands. The downloadable products (including maps, tables and text) and web system will be developed with end-users. Addition of data by users will be facilitated via an upload facility. New data or corrections will be validated by an editor before being incorporated. The project also intends to establish methodologies for analysis of the evidence and data to inform risk assessment, to develop complementary volcanic hazards models, and create relevant hazards and risk assessment tools. Only a very broad international interdisciplinary partnership that is closely aligned to the needs of users of research can meet all these ambitious objectives. The research will provide the scientific basis for mitigation strategies, responses to ash in the atmosphere for the aviation industry, land-use planning, evacuation plans and management of volcanic emergencies.