Advancing earthquake science worldwide
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 »
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 »