Caltech Hall Is Getting Stiffer, According to Decades of Data

Caltech Hall

11 November 2022–Caltech Hall, a 55-year-old nine-story reinforced concrete building on the Caltech campus, has been getting structurally stiffer over the past 20 years, according to a new report published in The Seismic Record. Previous work by seismologists and engineers had documented the building softening—that is, decreasing in stiffness—from its … Continue Reading »

At Work: Xiaohua (Eric) Xu

Eric Xu at Ridgecrest site

30 September 2022–“Geodesy is quite an old research field that started pretty much when humans wanted to measure the Earth, but it is also very new, especially since the rise of space-borne radar techniques,” said Xiaohua (Eric) Xu. “Space geodesy has helped scientists to measure not just the shape, but … Continue Reading »

At Work: Andrea Bryant

Andrea Bryant

31 August 2022–Andrea Bryant came to her work with NASA’s Dragonfly mission through what she calls “a beautiful accident.” Quarantining by herself in a tiny studio apartment in 2020, the University of Chicago graduate student was looking for a NASA internship that might fit with her exoplanet studies. A posting … Continue Reading »

At Work: Zoya Farajpour

Zoya Farajpour

29 July 2022–Zoya Farajpour was born in Iran, one of the most seismically active countries in the world. Most of Iran’s major cities and towns are in the vicinity of seismic faults, she said. “The oral and written history of this country is full of massive and destructive earthquake events … Continue Reading »

At Work: Manuel Matthew Mendoza

Matt Mendoza

29 June 2022–The scenes of devastation from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami were part of what made Manuel Mendoza consider a career as a geophysicist, he says. The combination of interesting science, travel and the ability to help people were all factors that convinced him to study earthquakes. Mendoza’s … Continue Reading »