Abstract
Extremely heavy damage in Kobe City of the 1995 M=7.2 Hyogo-ken Nanbu (Kobe) earthquake was localized in a narrow zone consisting of small patches with the size of several tens to hundreds of meters. We present a model that the heterogeneous uppermost crustal structure caused localization of seismic waves, which was similar to Anderson localization known in quantum physics, and this localization caused the localized damage. One-dimensional numerical calculations showed that localization of seismic waves could occur when the medium is heterogeneous. The result also showed that the localization of waves of high frequencies up to 3Hz would play an important role in generating strong motion damage.
