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 »
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 »