State-of-the-art for Assessing Earthquake Hazards in the United States

The short seismologic and historic records, in combination with the long recurrence intervals between potentially damaging earthquakes, create a need for developing geologic methods as alternatives or supplements to seismologic methods of establishing design earthquakes. The main goal of this report is to review geologic methods of determining the maximum probable earthquakes for active faults based on empirical relationships between magnitude, length of surface faulting, maximum fault displacement, and combinations of fault length and maximum displacement.