Advancing earthquake science worldwide
5 September 2018–SSA President Peter Shearer has deep ties to the Society he now heads. He published his first professional paper in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, and he gave his first professional talk at the 1981 SSA Annual Meeting in Berkeley. “I was incredibly nervous,” he … Continue Reading »
Traditional earthquake early warning systems detect the fast-moving, but less-powerful P-waves that radiate from an earthquake. From there, they quickly estimate the earthquake’s location and magnitude and send out an alert, often just seconds before the more powerful S- waves arrive (check out the difference between the different waves here). … Continue Reading »
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 »
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 »