Comparison of Seismic Hazard Studies in Iraq in Predicting Future Earthquakes

Abstract

Several seismic studies have been conducted on and around the Iraq region. These studies describe the intensity of the ground shaking that may occur in the future at a given location or region, which is very important for engineering purposes. This raises the need to compare them to determine which one is closest in terms of future earthquake predictions. The (7.3Mw) earthquake of Halabjah, was one of the recent and strongest earthquakes in the cities of Iraq, which occurred on 12 November 2017. Therefore, seismic studies were compared with this earthquake, especially since they were all conducted before the Halabjah earthquake occurred. The comparison was in terms of the Maximum Expected Future Earthquake Magnitude. The most important conclusion drawn from this comparison is that the 1989 Iraqi seismic code expectation is the closest in terms of earthquake magnitude, while AbdulMuttalib et al. (2018) expectation is the closest in time. Also, the 7.3Mw earthquake of Halabjah is less than all the values of the maximum expected future earthquake magnitudes from all studies, therefore; other stronger earthquakes are expected to occur in this region.