Key Outcomes

The workshop produced several important scientific and community outcomes that will guide future UNREST activities. Highlights are summarized below, with additional detail available in the workshop report.

1. A community vision for an UNREST Digital Twin: One of the workshop’s most significant outcomes was broad community support for developing a UNREST Digital Twin that couples curated geological observations with earthquake-cycle, dynamic rupture, deformation, and seismic hazard models. Participants refined the proposed framework by defining complementary Physical Twin and Virtual Twin components, identifying the California fault systems to be included, and outlining the geological datasets needed to enable automated testing of earthquake recurrence hypotheses. The Digital Twin represents a new approach to connecting observational datasets with numerical models, allowing more rapid evaluation of competing interpretations of earthquake behavior and seismic hazard.
2. Community priorities for improving earthquake hazard models: Participants reached consensus on the highest-priority geological observations needed to improve earthquake models across multiple applications. Priorities include improved characterization of fault geometry, spatially variable slip-rate measurements, standardized paleoseismic event histories with well-defined uncertainties, and better constraints on rupture segmentation and multi-fault earthquakes. These observations will directly support future development of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Model, earthquake simulators, deformation models, and dynamic rupture simulations.
3. Priorities for community datasets and cyberinfrastructure: In addition to identifying new observational priorities, participants defined the community infrastructure needed to organize, curate, and share these datasets. High-priority resources include standardized paleoseismic event databases containing event age probability distributions, expanded geologic slip-rate databases with multiple measurements along individual faults, and curated datasets describing rupture histories, rupture termination, slip distributions, and multi-fault ruptures. These community resources will provide common benchmarks for testing and validating earthquake models while enabling broader collaboration across the UNREST community.
4. Building an interdisciplinary UNREST community: The workshop brought together researchers from academia, government, and industry to establish a shared scientific agenda for improving earthquake recurrence models. Half of the participants were graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, or early-career faculty, reflecting the workshop’s commitment to developing the next generation of interdisciplinary earthquake scientists. Post-workshop surveys showed that participants left with a better understanding of how geological observations can inform earthquake models, greater confidence initiating collaborations between geologists and modelers, clearer priorities for future research and database development, and increased awareness of geological datasets available for model validation. More than 90% of survey respondents rated the workshop as engaging and valuable.

References

McGill, S. F., Blisniuk, K. D., Oskin, M. E., & Marshall, S. T. (2026). 2026 UNREST Workshop Report: Statewide California Earthquake Center. SCEC Contribution 15209

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