Search Results (12)

Building resilience is largely affected by the socioeconomic characteristics of the community as well as the physical and environmental local characteristics. The effectiveness of the adopted policies for resilience building partly relies on considering public concerns and insights. Insights from public narratives can enrich the resilience-building policies by sharing experiences or evidence from past disasters. Furthermore, it reveals priorities and concerns that society is expecting to be addressed. Even if the concerns are triggered by misinformation, addressing them (e.g., by disseminating corrective information) can increase the success of resilience-building policies. Tracing the public narrative over time shows how much people’s perspectives have changed after the disaster and how the relief and resilience-building efforts were compatible with society’s expectations. This study is aimed at extracting such insights from the public narrative on social media platforms after Morocco’s 2023 earthquake. Full article

The 2023 Al Haouz earthquake (Mw 6.7–6.9) is the strongest quake ever recorded in modern Morocco and ranks among North Africa’s most significant seismic events of the century. It struck the High Atlas region, causing widespread land changes, thousands of landslides, destruction in remote mountain villages, and heavy losses of life and cultural heritage. The earthquake not only had immediate humanitarian and economic effects but also dramatically transformed the landscape, uncovered new geological features, and reshaped the region—providing a unique opportunity to study seismic activity as geoheritage. Researchers have begun systematically documenting how this earthquake affected perceptions of seismic hazards in the High Atlas area. Although often considered a dark geoheritage, the event holds valuable lessons that can inform programs to strengthen resilience to geohazards. This research places the 2023 Al Haouz earthquake in a geoheritage context, underscoring its scientific, educational, and cultural importance. By analyzing how the earthquake altered the terrain, exposed tectonic activity, and left lasting geological marks, this work aims to bridge the gap between the high scientific interest in seismic events and their limited roles in geoheritage, conservation, tourism, and education. Full article

This paper presents ACTD-Net (Attention-Convolutional Transformer Denoising Network), a novel hybrid deep learning approach for speckle noise reduction from differential synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometric phase maps. Differential interferometric SAR (DInSAR) is a powerful technique for detecting and quantifying surface deformations, but the obtained phase maps are corrupted by speckle noise, topographic contributions, and atmospheric artifacts. Effective speckle denoising is crucial for accurate extraction of the desired deformation information. ACTD-Net combines the strengths of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs) in a two-stage architecture. First, a modified U-Net model with residual connections performs initial despeckling of the input DInSAR phase map. Then, the denoised phase map is fed into a Swin Transformer adapted with a masked self-attention mechanism, which further refines the denoising while preserving fine details and discontinuities related to surface deformations. Experimental results on simulated and real DInSAR data, including from the September 2023 Morocco earthquake region, demonstrate the effectiveness of ACTD-Net, outperforming traditional techniques and current deep learning methods in terms of quantitative metrics such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), and edge preservation index (EPI). The comprehensive evaluation shows that ACTD-Net achieves up to 33.55 dB PSNR, 0.96 SSIM, and 0.94 EPI on simulated data, and 33.62 ± 2.75 dB PSNR on 388 real Morocco earthquake patches, with significant improvements in preserving phase discontinuities and reducing unwrapping errors by approximately 62% on real earthquake data. Full article

The Rif Mountains in northern Morocco are highly exposed to geohazards, particularly earthquakes and mass movements. In this context, the Zoumi region is most affected, showing various mass movement types involving both unconsolidated and solid materials. This study evaluates the region’s susceptibility to mass movements using logistic regression (LR), applied for the first time in this area. The model incorporates eight key predisposing factors known to influence mass movement: slope gradient, slope aspect, land use, drainage density, elevation, lithology, fracturing density, and earthquake isodepths. Historical mass movements were mapped using remote sensing and field surveys, and statistical analysis calculation was conducted to analyze their spatial correlation with these environmental conditioning factors. A mass movement susceptibility (MMS) map was produced, classifying the region into four susceptibility levels, ranging from low to very high. Landslides were the most frequent movement type (36%). The LR model showed strong predictive performance, with an AUC of 88%, confirming its robustness. The final map reveals that 42% of the Zoumi area falls within the high to very high susceptibility zones. These results highlight the importance of using advanced modeling approaches to support risk mitigation and land use planning in environmentally sensitive mountain regions. Full article

On 8 September 2023, an Mw 6.8 earthquake struck the High Atlas Mountains in western Morocco, where the tectonic regime has been poorly investigated due to its remoteness and weaker seismicity compared to the northern plate boundary. In this study, we combine the measurements from the Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar images and the seismic data to invert the coseismic slip model of the 2023 Morocco earthquake. The results show a predominantly reverse slip motion with a minor left-lateral strike slip. The rupture process lasts about 15 s and reaches the maximum of its seismic moment release rate at about 5 s. The coseismic slip is mainly distributed in a depth range of ~20–30 km, with the ~1.4 m maximum coseismic slip at a depth of ~25 km. The Coulomb stress change suggests a significant stress loading effect on surrounding faults. The high-angle transpressive rupture kinematics of the 2023 Morocco earthquake reveal steep oblique–reverse faulting of the Tizi n’Test fault within the western High Atlas Mountains. The slight left-lateral strike slip and focal depth anomaly of this event are largely attributed to differential crustal shortening and the rejuvenation of early rift structures inherited from the Mesozoic complex evolution. Full article

Sentiment analysis is a cornerstone in many contextual data analyses, from opinion mining to public discussion analysis. Gender bias is one of the well-known issues in sentiment analysis models, which can produce different results for the same text depending on the gender it refers to. This gender bias leads to further bias in other text analyses that use such sentiment analysis models. This study reviews existing solutions to reduce gender bias in sentiment analysis and proposes a new method to address this issue. The proposed method offers more practical flexibility as it focuses on sentiment estimation rather than model training. Furthermore, it provides a quantitative measure to investigate the gender bias in sentiment analysis results. The performance of the proposed method across five sentiment analysis models is presented using texts containing gender-specific words. The proposed method is applied to a set of social media posts related to Morocco’s 2023 earthquake to estimate the gender-unbiased sentiment of the posts and evaluate the gender-unbiasedness of five different sentiment analysis models in this context. The result shows that, although the sentiments estimated with different models are very different, the gender bias in none of the models is drastically large. Full article

Product sustainability has moved beyond being an elective preference to becoming a certain necessity. However, earthquakes in different regions, particularly Türkiye–Syria, Afghanistan, and Morocco, have produced a substantial amount of construction waste and debris. In the context of green urban initiatives and environmental preservation, theeffective management and reduction of environmental impact (EI) are imperative. This urgency underscores the significance of the study’s focus on a ten-story reinforced concrete (RC) dormitory building in Győr, Hungary, chosen as a case study. The research delves into the incorporation of three distinct concrete compositions through seismic design, aligning with the innovative approach of emphasizing recycled aggregate-based concrete to mitigate the EI. Utilizing AxisVM X7 and Revit software, the study meticulously created and analyzed a detailed building model, revealing a significant percentage (35%) and amount (1519.89 tons) of concrete waste that could be incorporated into construction. The results also showed a reduction in both total carbon emissions and the price of materials by falling 27.5% and 9.13%, respectively. We propose an eco-friendly way to effectively reuse debris from earthquakes, focusing on the case study of the 2023 Türkiye–Syria earthquake and encouraging resource efficiency while also addressing the construction waste problems that arise after an earthquake. Full article

The study delves into the relationship between ionospheric total electron content (TEC) anomalies and seismic activity, with a focus on Morocco’s 6.8 Mw earthquake on 8 September 2023, lying within a tectonically active region at the convergence of the African and Eurasian Plates. To enhance the reliability of our findings, we incorporate space weather conditions, utilizing indices (Dst, Kp, and F10.7) to pinpoint periods of stable space weather. This minimizes the possibility of erroneously attributing natural ionospheric fluctuations to seismic events. Notably, our TEC analysis unveils positive and negative anomalies, with some occurring up to a week before the earthquake. These anomalies, exceeding predefined thresholds, provide compelling evidence of significant deviations from typical ionospheric conditions. Spatial mapping techniques employing both station-specific vTEC data and pseudorandom noise codes (PRNs) from multiple global navigation satellite system (GNSS) stations highlight a strong correlation between ionospheric anomalies and the earthquake’s epicenter. The integration of PRNs enhances coverage and sensitivity to subtle anomalies. Additionally, the analysis of satellite imagery and ground displacement data using Sentinel-1 confirms significant ground uplift of approximately 15 cm following the earthquake, shedding light on surface responses to seismic events. These findings underscore the potential of ionospheric science in advancing earthquake early warning systems and deepening our understanding of earthquake precursors, thus contributing to the mitigation of seismic event impacts and the protection of lives and infrastructure. Full article

The three aftershock sequences that occurred in Al Hoceima, Morocco, in May 1994 (Mw 6.0), February 2004 (Mw 6.4) and January 2016 (Mw 6.3) were stochastically modeled to investigate their temporal and energetic behavior. A form of the restricted trigger model known as the restricted epidemic type aftershock sequence (RETAS) was used for the temporal analysis of the selected series. The best-determined fit models for each sequence differ based on the Akaike information criteria. The revealed discrepancies suggest that, although the activated fault systems are close (within 10 to 20 km), their stress regimes change and shift across each series. In addition, a stochastic model was presented to study the strain release following a specific strong earthquake. This model was constructed using a compound Poisson process and depicted the progression of the strain release during the aftershock sequence. The proposed model was then applied to the data. After the RETAS model was used to evaluate the behavior of the aftershock decay rate, the best-fit model was obtained and integrated into the strain-release stochastic analysis. By detecting the potential disparities between the observed data and model, the applied stochastic model of strain release allows for a more comprehensive examination. Furthermore, comparing the observed and expected cumulative energy release numbers revealed some variations at the start of all three sequences. This demonstrates that significant aftershock clusters occur more frequently shortly after the mainshock at the start of the sequence rather than if they are assumed to occur randomly. Full article

The interest in assessing seismic risk in earthquake-prone regions in Morocco has been increasing over recent decades, to a large extent due to the substantial amount of damage imposed by recent events and because the population in these regions has grown significantly. In this context, the present study is aimed to contribute to the understanding of seismic risk in the urban areas of the Rif region, one of the most seismically active zones of Morocco, through the development and analysis of 36 building models representative of this area. Two earthquake scenarios were considered for the assessment of the seismic hazard, based on the national seismic code and the European code adapted to local seismic parameters. The performance points, determined following generated response and capacity spectra, made it possible to establish damage probability matrices. Obtained results corroborate those of previous reports, confirming that the damage is more significant in Imzouren due to the nature of the soil. It has also been shown that the credibility of the response spectra drawn from the national code is questioned, given the extreme damage estimated. The adapted European spectrum proved to be a more reliable probabilistic earthquake scenario for damage estimation. Full article

The last seismic events showed that tunnel lining may suffer extensive damage. Employing numerical modeling has a great importance in predicting the seismic performance of tunnels. This paper tests the tunnel lining of the Zaouit Ait Mellal (ZAM) twin tunnels located between the cities of Marrakesh and Agadir in Morocco. Dynamic analysis was adopted by FLAC 2D software using the finite-difference elements. Four soil cross-sections were chosen, with different support devices installed along the twin tunnels, such as rock bolts and steel ribs. The seismic signals introduced as input were obtained from three different earthquakes: Al Hoceima 2004 in Morocco, EL Centro 1940 in the USA, and Kobe 1995 in Japan. The numerical results show that the deformation of the tunnel lining is more noteworthy in the sections using steel ribs compared to those using rock bolts, which is observed by the large values of relative displacement, reaching 1020 (mm) and 2.29 × 105 (N.m/m) of maximum bending moment. The analysis indicates that these sections present higher vulnerability during an earthquake, which should be considered when looking at the overall safety of the tunnel. Full article

The main purpose of this study is to assess seismic risk and present earthquake loss scenarios for the city of Imzouren, in northern Morocco. An empirical approach was chosen to assess the seismic vulnerability of the existing buildings, using the Vulnerability Index Method (RISK-UE), and considering two earthquake scenarios (deterministic and probabilistic). Special concern was given to the seismic vulnerability in Imzouren since the 2004 earthquake (24 February, mw = 6.4) that struck the region and caused substantial damage. A site investigation was conducted in the city targeting more than 3000 residential buildings, which had been closely examined and catalogued to assess their seismic vulnerability. The results of the seismic risk assessment in the city are represented through damage to the buildings, harm to the population and economic loss. Generally, the results obtained from the deterministic approach are in agreement with the damage caused by the 2004 earthquake. Full article