Evaluation of The Seismic Hazard in The Marmara Region (Turkey) Based on Updated Databases

Abstract

The increase in the wealth of information on the seismotectonic structure of the Marmara region after two devastating earthquakes (M7.6 Izmit and M7.2 Duzce events) in the year 1999 opened the way for the reassessment of the probabilistic seismic hazard in the light of new datasets. In this connection, the most recent findings and outputs of different national and international projects concerning seismicity and fault characterization in terms of geometric and kinematic properties are exploited in the present study to build an updated seismic hazard model. A revised fault segmentation model, alternative earthquake rupture models under a Poisson and renewal assumptions, as well as recently derived global and regional ground motion prediction equations (GMPEs) are put together in the present model to assess the seismic hazard in the region. Probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (PSHA) is conducted based on characteristic earthquake modelling for the fault segments capable of producing large earthquakes and smoothed seismicity modelling for the background smaller magnitude earthquake activity. The time-independent and time-dependent seismic hazard results in terms of spatial distributions of three ground-shaking intensity measures (peak ground acceleration, PGA, and 0.2 s and 1.0 s spectral accelerations (SA) on rock having 10% and 2% probabilities of exceedance in 50 years) as well as the corresponding hazard curves for selected cities are shown and compared with previous studies.