Problems of Engineering Seismology: article

Аnnotation: The value of the Earth’s crust rocks ultimate strain together with other physical-and-mechanical characteristics plays an important role in problems related to the soil bearing resistance and behaviour. Among the problems are, in particular, estimating the maximal values of displacements, velocities and accelerations of grounds in the course of quakes, determining of the value of potential strain energy accumulated in the medium when a process of a large quake nucleation runs, forecast of a quake by «ultimate strain of rocks» forerunner. The paper represents a developed method for determining the value of ultimate strain of soils thickness of the Earth’s crust in natural conditions by the relative slips on the earth surface. We obtained the empirical dependences of the value of ultimate strain on the earthquake relative slips, the rupture length and the seismic moment by analysing values calculated by the proposed method for the 44 strong earthquakes with magnitude of 5.6-8.5. A comparative analysis of the ultimate strain values obtained by other authors with the method of geodesic triangulation is given.