Millennium Tower is a 58-story luxury high rise in San Francisco. It cost $350 million to build and contains units that start at $1.6 million and go up to over $10 million. The builders chose to sink support pilings 24 m (80 ft) into bay fill mud and dense sand rather than the 60 m (200 ft) needed to reach bedrock. Since the building was completed in 2009, it has sunk 38 cm (16 in) and is tilting 5 cm (2 in) to the northwest (Matier and Ross 2016). This is not just a concern to the 400 residents. Taxpayers have already spent $58 million building a buttress between the tower and the adjacent Transbay Transit Center that is under construction. The subsidence is not yet considered a safety issue, but residents are concerned.

Central Europe is a complex mosaic of crustal elements, including Cadomian fragments, Caledonian and Variscan microcontinents and suture zones, as well as Mesozoic and Alpine tectonostratigraphic successions (Fig. 1.1). These disparate elements were assembled during the various Precambrian and Phanerozoic (Caledonian, Variscan and Alpine) orogenies, the end result being a geological history of over 3500 million years. Over this long and complex period of crustal evolution, older consolidated crustal elements were repeatedly remobilized and overprinted by later events. 

The history of the practice of earthquake geology extends more than a century into the past, but it is still only a fledgling field as a modern discipline. In fact, most of what we know has been learned only in the past quarter century. And so it is not surprising that this textbook is the first attempt to survey systematically the purposes, methods, and scientific principles of the geological investigation of earthquakes. Our impetus for writing this book was, in part, the frustration we felt in teaching, year after year, earthquake geology classes without the benefit of a textbook.

The passion to understand the Geology of Egypt could be traced back to 1150 BC. In this year, the oldest geological map in the world was prepared to illustrate the geology of the Hammamat-Fawakhir area in the central part of the Eastern Desert of Egypt.