Advancing earthquake science worldwide
16 August 2021–Earthquakes are happening all the time inside Louisa Brotherson’s lab. Tiny ones, at least—and the strike-slip faults involved occur in Perspex plastic, not rock. Using a machine called a triaxial deformation apparatus, Brotherson can apply different pressures and stresses on the plastic to mimic the conditions that lead … Continue Reading »
15 July 2021–For Amir Salaree, the road to studying tsunamis began when he was a physics major at the University of Tehran, “looking for simple, real-world applications of all the beautiful math and physics that I was learning which would be useful to people,” he recalled. Visiting a friend in … Continue Reading »
15 April 2021–The list of Paula Koelemeijer’s study subjects would be enough to pique anyone’s interest: continent-sized blobs in the Earth’s lower mantle, mountains on its core, and … elephants. More about the elephants later. Koelemeijer, a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Royal Holloway University of London, is a … Continue Reading »
14 February 2020–As he pursued his master’s degree at Boise State University, Marlon Ramos was doing what he calls “traditional, active-source seismology,” interpreting seismic pictures of tsunami-producing faults near the Kodiak Island segment of the Alaska-Aleutian megathrust zone. “I had an interest in subduction zones and the very large earthquakes … Continue Reading »
20 November 2019–The terms may seem interchangeable to a layperson, but “hazard” and “risk” mean very different things in earthquake science. A seismic hazard is a natural phenomenon such as the level of ground shaking caused by an earthquake. Seismic risk, on the other hand, refers to the probability that … Continue Reading »
16 September 2019–Earthquake faults have short memories—or at least, that’s what the traditional earthquake cycle model suggests. Based on the elastic rebound theory proposed by Harry Fielding Reid after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the traditional model assumes that each earthquake in an area occurs independently of one another, and … Continue Reading »