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Kinematic analysis and fault-dependence of building-wall fracture patterns during moderate earthquakes

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Abstract

Two recent moderate earthquakes in South Korea, the 2016 MW 5.5 Gyeongju earthquake and 2017 MW 5.4 Pohang earthquake, caused damages to modern residential buildings. These events occurred with almost the same magnitude and duration in the same seismotectonic environment but exhibited remarkably different focal depths, faulting types, surface deformation, and especially structural damage features, but the reasons for these contrasts remain unknown. Furthermore, the building damage patterns are different from the natural damages, which have typical patterns depending on the fault types. It is important to understand the key reasons of these different phenomena to prevent destructive hazards from future earthquakes, particularly in densely populated intraplate regions. Here, we reveal the relationships between the geological-seismic parameters and earthquake damage features based on the patterns of building damage associated with these two events. During post-event urgent field surveys, we systematically observed en-echelon (or Riedel-type) sub-horizontal fractures in building walls associated with strike-slip motion and high-angle conjugate X-shaped fractures in building walls associated with predominantly reverse oblique-slip motion. We attribute the different patterns of earthquake damage to variations in faulting types and associated ground motions; strike-slip faulting resulting in horizontal shear and oblique-slip faulting yielding vertical ground motion. We argue that these interesting characteristics of building damage are mainly caused by stress conditions depending on the environmental change from the underground crust to the ground surface of free face. Our study highlights the importance of post-event investigations of earthquake damage to improve the level of seismic hazard assessment. Our findings from this study could serve as a reference for establishing proper anti-earthquake design and reinforcement for seismic protection.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) and the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy (MOTIE) of the Republic of Korea (No. 20201510100020) and by a grant (GP2020-014) from the Research in Active Tectonics and Development of Fault Segment Model for Intraplate Regions from the Basic Research Project of the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM) funded by the Korean Ministry of Science and ICT. We thank H.I. Cho for his constructive contribution to this work which greatly improved the manuscript. We thank the two anonymous reviewers for valuable reviews of the manuscript and editor for constructive editorial guidance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Major of Environmental Geosciences, Pukyong National University, Busan, 48513, Republic of Korea

    Young-Seog Kim, Taehyung Kim & Jinhyun Lee

  2. Active Fault and Earthquake Hazard Mitigation Research Institute, Pukyong National University, Busan, 48513, Republic of Korea

    Young-Seog Kim & Sambit Prasanajit Naik

  3. Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources, Daejeon, 34123, Republic of Korea

    Jin-Hyuck Choi, Kwangmin Jin & Taehyung Kim

  4. Geological Science, Korea University of Science and Technology, Daejeon, 34113, Republic of Korea

    Jin-Hyuck Choi

  5. Institute of Earth Sciences, Academia Sinica, No. 128, Sec. 2, Academia Road, Nangang, Taipei, 11529, Taiwan

    Gong-Ruei Ho

  6. Active Tectonics Research Center, Geologic Hazards Division, Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM), 124 Gwahak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 34123, Republic of Korea

    Jin-Hyuck Choi

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  1. Young-Seog Kim
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Kim, YS., Naik, S.P., Choi, JH. et al. Kinematic analysis and fault-dependence of building-wall fracture patterns during moderate earthquakes. Geosci J 27, 769–780 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12303-023-0024-7

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