The July 29 earthquake on Russia's Kamchatka peninsula was among the most powerful recorded by modern instruments, setting off tsunami warnings around the Pacific rim. The magnitude 8.8 earthquake caused part of the peninsula to sink by about six feet and set off volcanic eruptions, according to the Unified Geophysical Service of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Fortunately, there do not appear to have been any fatalities or major damage.
John Rundle, Distinguished Professor in the departments of Physics and Astronomy and of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Davis, had previously included the Kamchatka region in an analysis of earthquake risk published in 2018. The analysis used both "nowcasting," which uses past seismic data to determine the current level of earthquake risk for a seismically active area, and a metric based on Shannon Information Entropy.
"In both cases, the Kamchatka fault zone ranked among the highest risk faults for a potential great earthquake," Rundle wrote in a LinkedIn post last week.
Rundle noted that in 2018, they had assessed the Earthquake Potential Score for Kamchatka at 70.4 percent, among the highest in the analysis. A new calculation with 2025 data raised that score to 74.6 percent.
Kamchatka was not, however, the highest-risk region in the analysis. The eastern Aleutian islands had a score of 77.8 percent in 2018, with a recent calculation raising the EPS to 81.4 percent, he wrote.
Rundle talks about the background to nowcasting earthquakes in this L&S video.
This article originally appeared on the UC Davis News website.
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Global Seismic Nowcasting With Shannon Information Entropy (Earth and Space Science)
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