Date of Award

2010

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Bioinformatics & Computational Biology

First Advisor

Haydar Al-Shukri

Abstract

Satellite images and field surveys reveal the existence of several liquefaction features in east central Arkansas on an area that is not known to have experienced major earthquakes in the past. The research of this dissertation is part of a long term comprehensive program to study and assess the seismic risk in the central United States. This research successfully showed that geophysical methods are effective and more economical than traditional drilling and trenching methods. Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and Capacitively Coupled Resistivity (CCR) techniques were comprehensively implemented at over 36 sites in the study area near Marianna, Arkansas, United States. This implementation revealed that the discovered features, such as sand blows, feeder dikes, ground subsidence, ground failure, and lateral spreading, are earthquake related. Using the feeder dike orientation and sand blow morphology in at least twelve sites, a deep seated fault was traced that might be responsible for generating a number of prehistoric earthquakes. This surface expression oriented in a northwest-southeast direction for a minimum length of 17 km. GPR was instrumental in locating feeder dikes of sand blows and to visualize the contact between sand blows and the buried paleosurface and to image the sand blows in three dimensions to define their size and morphology. Resistivity data was also collected at several sites. The most prominent anomalies in both GPR and resistivity data are associated with sand blows and their feeder dikes.

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