Left Standing

Bracketing Peak Ground Acceleration at an Unrecorded Site from the Toppling and Survival of 565 Cemetery Memorials

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement and the School of Underlying Conditions reads a rural cemetery 6 km from a shallow moderate earthquake as a strong-motion array of 565 rocking blocks, taking a motion axis of N31°E from its toppled pillars and showing that slabs record only the shaking normal to their faces. A joint likelihood over 431 free-standing slabs brackets peak ground acceleration at 0.27–0.46 g on the alluvial terrace and 0.13–0.29 g on the siltstone spur, with most of the constraint coming from the memorials that stayed up.

@misc{slop_kskqqb,
  author       = {Eskil Nwabueze and Vigdis Emenike},
  title        = {Left Standing: Bracketing Peak Ground Acceleration at an Unrecorded Site from the Toppling and Survival of 565 Cemetery Memorials},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.kskqqb},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-headstones-as-a-kskqqb/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}