The Niigata M7.5 Earthquake of 1964 remains uniquely important among field case histories for understanding

liquefaction triggering and manifestations. Much has been written about the Kawagishi-cho strong motion record, the

Niigata case histories of seismic-soil liquefaction triggering, and the post-triggering lateral spread displacements. This

paper explores a new and different perspective on the disaster - the geologic setting and geomorphic processes

reworking Holocene sand units that ultimately create the most severe liquefaction effects during the earthquake. Across

the city, liquefaction was most pronounced in fluvially-reworked sands derived from three aeolian and barrier island

dune fields upriver and along the coastline. The largest source of beach and aeolian sand material that liquefied in

1964 is a mid-Holocene maximum transgressive barrier island that deposited fifty–sixty meters of sand along the then

coastline five-eight-thousand years ago. Tectonic-downwarping and -subsidence of the Echigo Plain has allowed for

delta-progradational processes to build out a thick sedimentary prism beneath the current location of Niigata City.

Within this prism, the Shinano and Agano Rivers have eroded and fluvially-redeposited these barrier island sands, and

those of a closer-in two-three-thousand-year beach-ridge deposit, beneath districts of the city. Most recently, for

human-placed fills the materials are sourced almost entirely from modern coastal beach-ridge and sand dune deposits

fronting the Sea of Japan. More than any other factors, these geologic conditions and geomorphic depositional histories

controlled the locations and severity of soil liquefaction during the 1964 event. Today, these geologic units persist as

a future risk to infrastructure of Niigata City.

Point cloud modeling of rock slopes using LIDAR and Structure-from-Motion digital stereophotogrammetry provides,

at a minimum, thousands of facets and facet normals that can be used to identify the densities of orientations of rock mass

discontinuities, the geometries of potentially removable blocks, and the character of the excavation face. As part of the Engineering

Geology graduate curriculum at the Civil and Environmental Engineering program at the University of California, Berkeley we teach

graduate students an integrated methodology for [a] gathering point cloud information be laser or camera; [b] computing facets and

facet normals form point clouds for stereonet presentation and geometric analysis of block dimension; [c] extract rock mass

discontinuities from stereonet data to analyze key blocks, assess discontinuous deformation analysis (DDA) behavior, and model

rock slope stability. These new methods require a suite of different software tools discussed in the paper to move through the workflow

process. Computational rock mechanics provides data sets that are orders of magnitude richer in detail and result in better

understanding of rock slope and tunnel key block behavior. Full application of computational rock mechanics methods should reduce

the cost of bolting by identifying critical support orientations and design loads.

Liquefaction mapping currently relies on visual analysis of satellite and aerial images that covers the area of interest. Sand boils, lateral spreading and ground settlement are common evidences that researchers look for when identifying liquefaction damaged areas after an earthquake. However, this method can be unreliable. For example, irrelevant objects on images like burnt rice stalks in agricultural field can be misclassified as sand boils. Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), as a remote sensing technique, is widely used for characterizing ground displacement with high resolution and accuracy. With the increasing availability of free InSAR data sets and the short return period of modern satellites, co-seismic InSAR analysis becomes possible shortly after the occurrence of an earthquake. Therefore, InSAR is well suited for analyzing lateral and vertical displacement caused by liquefaction and works as a reference for field reconnaissance teams. In this thesis three earthquake case histories with significant liquefaction damage, specifically the 2010-2011 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence, including 2010 Darfield Earthquake and 2011 Christchurch Earthquake, the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake, and the 2018 Hokkaido Eastern Iburi Earthquake are analyzed with four different InSAR methods: differential InSAR analysis, persistent scatter time series analysis, coherence-based method and pixel (dense) offset analysis. The co-seismic displacement results are converted into vertical and horizontal displacements to compare with field observations from reconnaissances right after these earthquakes. After comparing the effectiveness of the different methods and different satellites at each site, an InSAR workflow for analysing earthquake-induced liquefaction observations is presented.