Brett W. Maurer

Morgan D. Sanger, Olyvia B. Smith, Brett W. Maurer et al.

Large earthquakes along the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) are expected to trigger widespread soil liquefaction that could disrupt transportation systems across the U.S. Pacific Northwest. However, past regional assessments have relied on simple geologic screening methods and binomial shaking thresholds that are only loosely informed by liquefaction science. This study introduces a mechanics-informed, data-driven framework for estimating liquefaction-induced road closures and service reductions, and the framework is applied to a magnitude-9 CSZ earthquake. Predicted liquefaction severity is translated into segment-level probabilities of closure and reduced service using empirically derived fragility relationships. These probabilities are mapped at 90-m resolution and propagated through the National Highway System using a spatially correlated Monte Carlo simulation to estimate link-level disruption. Results show that impacts are concentrated in low-lying coastal zones, river valleys, and urban waterfronts, with major disruptions expected along critical routes including U.S. Route 101. Local mobility is further examined in Pacific and Grays Harbor counties, Washington, where limited network redundancy, strong shaking, and high liquefaction susceptibility lead to elevated probabilities of isolation and loss of hospital access. Socioeconomic analysis reveals modest but statistically significant associations between road impacts and demographic indicators, suggesting that liquefaction impacts may compound with existing social vulnerabilities. While not a substitute for site-specific analysis, the results provide a regional baseline for emergency planning, risk communication, and prioritization of more advanced geotechnical sampling and analysis. Moreover, the methodology proposed here is not specific to the CSZ, but rather, could be applied to analogous studies of road impacts elsewhere.

Morgan D. Sanger, Brett W. Maurer

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly emerged in civil and environmental engineering (CEE) research, education, and practice as tools for project ideation, execution, and communication. However, it is unknown how prevalent LLM adoption is across CEE scholarship and whether it measurably alters research prose. Inspired by recent analyses of biomedical research, this study uses a vocabulary-based frequency-shift methodology to detect linguistic signals of LLM-assisted writing in a large corpus of CEE literature. A total of 149,452 abstracts published by the American Society of Civil Engineers from 2000 through 2025 are analyzed to quantify deviations from long-term vocabulary trends. Prior to the introduction of LLMs in 2022, CEE publications exhibit long-term trends toward longer abstracts and sentences, greater use of segmenting punctuation, higher required reading levels, and a shift toward active, first-person verb constructions. Beginning around 2023, however, the frequencies of many stylistic marker words (e.g., enhance) sharply depart from historical trajectories, accompanied by deviations in multiple semantic properties. Abstracts classified as likely LLM-assisted exhibit increased lexical diversity, comma use, and complexity, with reduced passive voice and hedging language, producing prose that is more segmented, complex, and confident. The AI contribution of this study lies in the use of natural language processing to identify population-level linguistic signals of LLM-assisted text, applied to quantify the prevalence of LLM use and its influence on the vocabulary, structure, and tone of engineering scholarly writing. Together, these findings provide the first large-scale, data-driven assessment of how LLMs are beginning to reshape scholarly communication in CEE.

Morgan D. Sanger, Brett W. Maurer

Recent large-magnitude earthquakes have demonstrated the damaging consequences of soil liquefaction and reinforced the need to understand and plan for liquefaction hazards at a regional scale. In the United States, the Pacific Northwest is uniquely vulnerable to such consequences given the potential for crustal, intraslab, and subduction zone earthquakes. In this study, the liquefaction hazard is predicted geospatially at high resolution and across regional scales for 85 scenario earthquakes in the states of Washington and Oregon. This is accomplished using an emergent geospatial model that is driven by machine learning, and which predicts the probability of damaging ground deformation by surrogating state-of-practice geotechnical models. The adopted model shows improved performance and has conceptual advantages over prior regional-scale modeling approaches in that predictions (i) are informed by mechanics, (ii) employ more geospatial information using machine learning, and (iii) are geostatistically anchored to known subsurface conditions. The utility of the resulting predictions for the 85 scenarios is then demonstrated via asset and network infrastructure vulnerability assessments. The liquefaction hazard forecasts are published in a GIS-ready, public repository and are suitable for disaster simulations, evacuation route planning, network vulnerability analysis, land-use planning, insurance loss modeling, hazard communication, public investment prioritization, and other regional-scale applications.

Morgan D. Sanger, Brett W. Maurer

Earthquake ground motions and the related damage can be significantly impacted by near-surface soils. Accurate predictions of seismic hazard require depth-continuous models of soil stiffness, commonly described in terms of shear-wave velocity (VS). For regional-scale studies, efforts to predict VS remotely, such as the U.S. Geological Survey's National Crustal Model, tend to emphasize deeper lithologic velocity structures, thus simplifying important near-surface soil velocity variations, and tend to be produced at relatively coarse geospatial resolution for one geographic area. In this study, we define a functional form to describe VS-with-depth across the conterminous U.S. We calibrate the parameters of the function using a national compilation of more than 9,000 in-situ geotechnical measurements. By coupling the parametric framework with geospatial machine learning, the model can be leveraged to provide consistent, high resolution VS-depth predictions of the near-surface geotechnical layer across the U.S., complementing the National Crustal Model and supporting applications such as physics-based ground motion simulations and coseismic hazard assessments.