CO-SPONSORED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT AND THE EERI WASHINGTON CHAPTER

Monday April 1st, 2019 4:00 PM
Reception to follow Lecture

University of Washington
Alders Hall – Alders Commons Auditorium
1315 Northeast Campus Parkway
Seattle, WA 98105

FREE Admission

Seismic Landslide Assessments: Bridging the Gap between Engineers and Earth Scientists

Earthquake-induced landslides represent a significant seismic hazard, as evidenced by recent earthquakes in Kaikoura, New Zealand and Gorkha, Nepal, and proper planning/mitigation requires accurate evaluation of the potential for seismic landslides.
Engineers often tackle this problem through a detailed evaluation of individual slopes and more recently have introduced performance-based engineering (PBE) concepts into the analysis.
Recognizing the compounding effects of multiple landslides across an area, earth scientists often evaluate seismic landslides at a regional scale. This approach sacrifices details, but provides a broader assessment of the impacts of earthquake induced landslides.
This presentation will describe the integration of performance-based engineering concepts into regional-scale seismic landslide assessments. The basic PBE framework for seismic landslides will be introduced along with the modifications required to apply it at a regional scale. The application of the approach for a seismic landslide hazard map will be presented. The use of seismic landslide inventories to validate regional landslide assessments will be discussed, along with advancements in developing seismic landslide inventories using remote sensing techniques.
Finally, research needs required to further advance regional seismic landslide assessments will be presented.

Ellen M. Rathje is the Warren S. Bellows Centennial Professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineerin
g and also a Senior Research Scientist at the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include seismic site response analysis, earthquake-induced landslides, field reconnaissance after earthquakes, and remote sensing of geotechnical phenomena.

She is a founding member of and current co-chair of the Geotechnical Extreme Event Reconnaissance Association (GEER) which coordinates National Science Foundation-sponsored geotechnical investigations around the world after major earthquakes and other natural disasters such as floods, to advance research and improve engineering practice. Rathje is also the Principal Investigator of the DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure project, a web-based research platform for the National Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) that provides computational tools to manage and analyze critical data for natural hazards research. Closer to home, Rathje is co-principal investigator for the Center for Integrated Seismicity Research and the TexNet Seismic Monitoring Program, both housed at the Bureau of Economic Geology at UT.

The William B. Joyner Lecture is jointly awarded by EERI and SSA to those who have provided outstanding earth science contributions to the theory and practice of earthquake engineering or outstanding earthquake engineering contributions to the direction and focus of earth science research—together with demonstrated skills of communication at the interface of earthquake science and earthquake engineering.