Public Lecture - From faults to forecasts: understanding earthquake behaviour and variability
Public Lecture - From faults to forecasts: understanding earthquake behaviour and variability
Location
Date
Description
It will probably come as no surprise to any geologist that earthquakes and tectonic faults are highly variable and complex phenomena. Active (and inactive) faults rarely occur in isolation and have variable geometries, kinematics, and slip rates. This fact, coupled with fault interaction, means that earthquakes are variably distributed in time and space over tectonically active regions. These complexities contribute to some of the challenges associated with probabilistic seismic hazard assessment. In this talk, I will mostly focus on the insights we can gain about normal faulting and earthquake behaviour from the central Apennines of Italy, and how our results can be used to inform potential variability and therefore uncertainties in other tectonically active regions.
Central Italy is an ideal place to study normal faulting and earthquakes, as there is a nearly 700 year record of damaging earthquakes and the normal faults are well exposed as bedrock scarps at the surface. There have been recent damaging earthquakes, including the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake (famous for a group a scientists being convicted, and then acquitted of manslaughter) and the 2016 Amatrice earthquake sequence. Using a combination of fieldwork, geochemistry and physics-based numerical modelling, results from central Italy can be used to explore fault interaction, earthquake behaviour and seismic hazard.
Speaker Bio
Zoë is currently an Associate Professor of Active Tectonics and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, based at the University of Plymouth. Her current project, Quake4D, is aiming to build a geologically-rich, physics-based fault model and produce a synthetic catalogue of earthquakes to explore uncertainties in seismic hazard analysis. She is particularly interested in how fault systems interact together to generate earthquakes over long periods of time. She completed her undergraduate at the University of Cambridge from 2009-2013, and then moved to UCL for her PhD from 2013-2017, supervised by Prof Gerald Roberts and Prof Joanna Faure Walker, where she studied earthquakes and active faults in central Italy. During her PhD, she held a JSPS short-term fellowship and visited Tohoku University in Japan for 4 months.
Schedule
This Public Lecture will take place on Tuesday 20 January 2026.
This is a hybrid event, which can be attended in person at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, or online via Zoom.
17:30–18:00: Guests arrive for the Public Lecture. Refreshments served in the Lower Library.
18:00–19:00: Talk takes place (including Q&A)
19:00-20:00: Drinks Reception in the Lower Library
20:00: Event end
Venue
The Geological Society, Burlington House, W1J 0BG London
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