ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book contains five contributions related to in situ monitoring of faults. It investigates shear-wave splitting in and around the focal area of the 1995 the Hyogo-ken Nan (Kobe) earthquake during three years after its occurrence to find evidence for fault healing. The book discusses the ultrasonic tomography imaging technique used to study rock structure. A new method combining classic velocity tomography and attenuation tomography, resulting in the robust and sensitive enhanced velocity tomography, is of special interest. The book presents a model-free approach to evaluation of seismic hazard, based on a non-parametric estimator of the distribution of earthquake magnitude. It also investigates the chaotic behavior of the generation processes of mining-induced seismicity from time variations of generalized fractal dimension, calculated from epicenter distributions, time intervals between consecutive events and their energy.
