Advances in physics-based forward modeling, source imaging methods, scaling relations for static and dynamic parameters of earthquakes, as well as laboratory experiments help understanding the dynamic processes occurring during seismic ruptures,
but also point to challenging scientific questions still to be tackled:

For instance, what are the first-order physical processes that are relevant, at a given spatio-temporal scale, to control the macroscopic evolution of a dynamic rupture and to affect the resulting ground motion characteristics? Is the physics of fault rupture the same for large and small earthquakes? How can earthquake hazard assessment account for source effects? Which aspects of the source rupture process need to be considered to further investigate local tsunami generation, triggering phenomena, induced seismicity and earthquake cycles?
Earthquake sources are imaged using a variety of seismic data and surface deformation measurements, such as GPS and InSAR, to learn about characteristics of active faults and fault systems. Since each data set has its strength and limitations in imaging specific source properties, a common approach is to combine different data sets into a single inversion. But how robust are these source models? And what are the resulting uncertainties?
Because of the abundance of small events, understanding whether earthquakes are self-similar down to very small ruptures is of practical importance for estimating hazard for natural earthquakes. Studies of earthquake scaling relations involve analysis of the Gutenberg-Richter distribution, seismic moment tensor (e.g. existence of non-DC focal mechanisms) as well as comparisons of static and dynamic source parameters such as stress drop and apparent stress. In spite of increased station coverage in recent years, observations of parameter scaling relationships vary widely.

This session aims at further understanding of source processes and earthquake scaling relationships over a wide range of magnitudes. It discusses advances in numerical and theoretical forward modeling of dynamic earthquake sources. It investigates whether variations in parameter scaling are regionally dependent. It explores whether observed differences in scaling relations are real, and if so, what physical mechanisms might account for such differences. This session is also dedicated to studies that aim at advancing earthquake source imaging techniques to obtain more robust rupture models that are desired to provide a better basis for interpretation of earthquakes with respect to the causative faults and the tectonic systems.
Within this frame our session provides a forum to discuss case studies on recent significant earthquakes, such as the 2009 L'Aquila, the 2010 Chile and Haiti, the 2011 Tohoku-oki and the 2010-2011 New Zealand earthquakes.