Advancing earthquake science worldwide
This category is for the At Work column
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 »
11 May 2018–How big is an earthquake? Seismologists have been measuring this feature—the magnitude of an earthquake—for more than a century, but the answers are not always as straightforward as one would think, says Allison Bent, a research seismologist with Natural Resources Canada. Numbers associated with the Richter scale and … Continue Reading »
11 April 2018–In 1994, Natalia Ruppert arrived at the University of Alaska Fairbanks to start graduate school, uncertain whether she would stay for more than one semester. Now, Ruppert has been studying earthquakes in her adopted state and country for almost 25 years, with no plans to leave Fairbanks in … Continue Reading »
13 March 2018–The way that soil and rock behave during and after an earthquake are studied not just by earth scientists, but by the engineers who must build against the next earthquake. It’s an aspect of seismology that isn’t always recognized by the public, says University of Texas at Austin … Continue Reading »