Ground rupture is a visible breaking and displacement of the Earths surface along the trace of the fault, which may be of the order of several meters in the case of major earthquakes. Ground rupture is a major risk for large engineering structures such as dams, bridges, and nuclear power stations and requires careful mapping of existing faults to identify any that are likely to break the ground surface within the life of the structure. Soil liquefaction
Soil liquefaction occurs when, because of the shaking, water-saturated granular material (such as sand) temporarily loses its strength and transforms from a solid to a liquid. Soil liquefaction may cause rigid structures, like buildings and bridges, to tilt or sink into the liquefied deposits. For example, in the 1964 Alaska earthquake, soil liquefaction caused many buildings to sink into the ground, eventually collapsing upon themselves. Human impacts
Physical damage from an earthquake will vary depending on the intensity of shaking in a given area and they type of population. Undeserved and developing communities frequently experience more severe impacts (and longer lasting) from a seismic event compared to well developed communities. Impacts may include:

Injuries and loss of life
Damage to critical infrastructure (short and long term)
Roads, bridges and public transportation networks
Water, power, swear and gas interruption
Communication systems
Loss of critical community services including hospitals, police and fire
General property damage
Collapse or destabilization (potentially leading to future collapse) of buildingsWith these impacts and others, the aftermath may bring disease, lack of basic necessities, mental consequences such as panic attacks, depression to survivors, and higher insurance premiums.
An example of an earthquake swarm is the 2004 activity at Yellowstone National Park. In August 2012, a swarm of earthquakes shook Southern Californias Imperial Valley, showing the most recorded activity in the area since the 1970s.Sometimes a series of earthquakes occur in what has been called an earthquake storm, where the earthquakes strike a fault in clusters, each triggered by the shaking or stress redistribution of the previous earthquakes. Similar to aftershocks but on adjacent segments of fault, these storms occur over the course of years, and with some of the later earthquakes as damaging as the early ones. Such a pattern was observed in the sequence of about a dozen earthquakes that struck the North Anatolian Fault in Turkey in the 20th century and has been inferred for older anomalous clusters of large earthquakes in the Middle East. Intensity and magnitude of earthquakes
Shaking of the earth is a common phenomenon that has been experienced by humans from the earliest of times. Before the development of strong-motion accelerometers, the intensity of a seismic event was estimated based on the observed effects. Magnitude and intensity are not directly related and calculated using different methods. The magnitude of an earthquake is a single value that describes the size of the earthquake at its source. Intensity is the measure of shaking at different locations around the earthquake.