Advancing earthquake science worldwide
This category is for the At Work column
1 October 2018–Before becoming a professor within the Sophisticated Earthquake Risk Evaluation Program – part of Kyoto University’s Disaster Prevention Research Institute – Hiroshi Kawase seemed destined to become an architect or structural engineer. He grew up watching his father design and build houses at the same time Japan was … Continue Reading »
5 September 2018–SSA President Peter Shearer has deep ties to the Society he now heads. He published his first professional paper in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, and he gave his first professional talk at the 1981 SSA Annual Meeting in Berkeley. “I was incredibly nervous,” he … Continue Reading »
Traditional earthquake early warning systems detect the fast-moving, but less-powerful P-waves that radiate from an earthquake. From there, they quickly estimate the earthquake’s location and magnitude and send out an alert, often just seconds before the more powerful S- waves arrive (check out the difference between the different waves here). … Continue Reading »
Seattle is the site of SSA’s 2019 Annual Meeting. It’s also one of the major cities along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, the volatile seismic region that stretches from Northern California to Vancouver Island. Formed by the Juan de Fuca, Gorda and Explorer plates dipping below the denser North American plate, … Continue Reading »
Say the word “seismograph,” and many minds go directly to the image of a machine scribbling out ink lines to trace the shaking of an earthquake. Seismology has always been a profession especially known for its tools, even though the field has moved far from the stylus and drum recorder. … Continue Reading »
21 June 2018–U.S. Geological Survey Research Geophysicist Annemarie Baltay recognized the importance of mathematics and the natural world at an early age. To keep her entertained in the car, her father would write math problems in a notebook for her to figure out. She also had a collection of rocks … Continue Reading »