Advancing earthquake science worldwide
This category is for the At Work column
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 »
4 September 2024–When Voon Hui Lai came to Australian National University as a postdoc, her department had just acquired a DAS interrogator “and I was basically tasked to make this thing work,” she recalled. “It was my first experience in deploying these really dense seismic sensors.” Distributed acoustic sensing or … Continue Reading »
29 July 2024–In the spring of 2024, Arsène Sadiki traveled from Goma Volcano Observatory (GVO) to share his research on the seismic precursors to the May 2021 eruption of Nyiragongo volcano. This volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo once played a significant role in Sadiki’s career choice, he recalled. … Continue Reading »
18 June 2024–Tamarah King, is there a question you hear often about Australian seismicity? “If I had a dollar for every time somebody told me ‘Australia doesn’t have earthquakes!’” King said. “Not just from the general populace, I regularly meet earthquake scientists who are genuinely surprised to hear about Australia’s … Continue Reading »