Supershear Strike-Slip Earthquake

As long as nobody reads this blog, I won't get into trouble with these extracts.  They are getting absolutely ruthless with this now.  Anyway, this is a supershear strike-slip earthquake, which has a very small zone of high PGV's, and is not as interesting as a supershear thrust fault.

So, this is why it is a supershear.  The rupture velocities at the bottom go up to 6 km/s, which is the P-wave velocity.  For 'normal' earthquakes, the rupture velocity should not exceed 3 km/s

And this is what it does.  It produces firm-ground PGV's at over 1 m/s.  When I'm pretty sure the glass-reactors were knocked out at 0.1 m/s, and Chile's cheap condos were knocked out at 0.7 m/s, you can imagine what 1.2 m/s can do!  Multiply that by 10 for soft soil basins, and the dirt flies in the air!

Please note that these people were also intelligent enough to just consider PGV for engineering purposes.  :)