Frontiers in Chinese seismology: Synthesizing innovations from the 18th Seismological Society of China Conference (SSC 2023)

The 18 th Academic Conference of the Seismological Society of China was held in Guiyang, China, on August 7, 2023, fostering academic exchanges on the latest advancements in earthquake science. The conference featured 170 abstracts and nearly 300 academic presentations. In this paper, we classify and summarize the scholars' presentations, analyzing the current state and progress of earthquake science in China from four key perspectives: crustal structure dynamics, earthquake mechanisms, seismic resilience of urban and rural infrastructure, and innovative earthquake services. The presentations reveal that research primarily focuses on detecting crustal structures in southwest China, with seismic imaging technology and magnetotelluric detection being the most commonly used methods. Studies on earthquake mechanisms are centered on recent destructive events, such as the 2023 M W 7.8 and M W 7.6 Türkiye earthquakes, the 2022 M W 6.7 Luding earthquake, and the 2021 M W 7.4 Madoi earthquake. Regarding seismic resilience, the focus is on shock resistance and seismic isolation experiments involving large-scale hybrid structures, as well as the formation mechanisms and risk assessments of earthquake-triggered disaster chains. Additionally, significant progress has been made in smart earthquake services, particularly in rapid disaster assessment, earthquake disaster information extraction technology, the China Seismic Experimental Site, and the strong-motion Flatfile database for mainland China. Overall, this conference highlighted that earthquake science in China has reached a new level of development. However, numerous scientific challenges and critical technologies remain to be addressed, such as acquiring higher-resolution crustal structures and applying big data and artificial intelligence to diverse seismic models and earthquake services, which requires the continued collaboration of researchers in the field.