Advancing earthquake science worldwide
This category is for the At Work column
11 April 2025—Rebecca Colquhoun liked math and science in school but wasn’t sure what kind of career that might launch. Should they go into physics? Chemistry? Computer science? “I was looking for something that was sort of a mixture, so I could put off deciding for a while longer,” Colquhoun … Continue Reading »
9 April 2025— Plane crashes are thankfully rare, but when they happen, investigators rely on the airplane’s “black box” for data to explain what happened and how to prevent it in the future. Seismic instruments deployed to gather strong motion data are kind of like those black boxes, said Keith … Continue Reading »
10 March 2025—“Moment tensors are a model to describe earthquake sources based on forces acting at the seismic source,” explains Boris Rösler. “In the 1960s, it was shown that these forces generate a seismic wavefield equivalent to slip on a fault. We can thus describe the geologic process of an … Continue Reading »
10 February 2025—Wilnelly Ventura-Valentín’s research as a Ph.D. student at Miami University in Ohio focuses on earthquake swarms, the bursts of seismic activity—small earthquakes all about the same magnitude—that start abruptly and end abruptly. “We don’t know a lot about what triggers this activity,” she explains, “and because we don’t … Continue Reading »
9 January 2025—Earthquakes may be the noisy, attention-getters of seismological research, but geophysicist Daniel Gittins is focused on something a bit quieter. “Creep is the slow, gradual movement along faults that happens without causing an earthquake. Unlike sudden earthquakes, which release a lot of energy, aseismic creep occurs smoothly and … Continue Reading »
4 October 2024–Julian Lozos describes his job—modestly—as “making fake earthquakes on his computer.” But the associate professor of geophysics at California State University, Northridge was also a fan of volcanoes from a young age. During his last visit at his parents’ home, “my mom found a book that I had … Continue Reading »