Tectonic hazards/Seismic load

Educational level: this is a research resource.

Main resource: Earthquake engineering

Seismic load is one of the basic concepts of earthquake engineering which means application of an earthquake-generated agitation to a building structure.

The last Day of Pompeii by Karl Briullov, The State Russian Museum.

It happens at contact surfaces of a structure either with the ground, see The Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering Portal, or with adjacent structures, see Seismic Pounding between Adjacent Building Structures, or with gravity waves from tsunami, see Tsunami wave propagation.

Look up Tectonic hazards/Seismic load in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Seismic load depends, primarily, on:

• Anticipated earthquake’s parameters at the site
• Geotechnical parameters of the site
• Structure’s parameters
• Characteristics of the anticipated gravity waves from tsunami (if applicable).

Sometimes, seismic load exceeds ability of a structure to resist it without being broken, partially or completely. Due to their mutual interaction, seismic loading and seismic performance of a structure are intimately related.