2012 IRIS/SSA Distinguished Lectureship
The Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Seismological Society of America (SSA) are pleased to announce theselection of two experienced speakers from the Earth Science research community for the 2012 IRIS/SSA Distinguished Lectureship Series.
The speakers and their topics are:
Dr. Gregory Beroza
Wayne Loel Professor; Department Chair, Department of Geophysics
Stanford University, Stanford, California
The Tortoise and the Hare: Slow vs Fast Earthquakes
and
Dr. Miaki Ishii
Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Harvard Seismology Group
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Imaging the Japan Earthquake From 5000 Miles Away
Our speakers are chosen each year for their interesting subject matter as well as their ability to convey scientific ideas to general public audiences. This Lecture Series will start in January 2012. IRIS andSSA will cover all of the speakers’ travel and lodging costs for large public venues and canalso provide free seismology outreach materials. Please see the IRIS Web site for more information on the 2012 series, as well as general information on the Distinguished Lectureship program:
If you are interested in scheduling a speaker, please contact:
Patrick McQuillan
202-682-2220
Dr. Gregory Beroza
Wayne Loel Professor
Department Chair
Department of Geophysics
Stanford University
Stanford, California
The Tortoise and the Hare:
Slow vs Fast Earthquakes
In the past decade, earthquake scientists have discovered a familyofunusually slow earthquakes. These slow earthquakes occurin diversegeologic environments. Like ordinary earthquakes, they occur as slipon the same faults that host ordinary earthquakes,but they take a longtime to unfold, suchthat they can be described as "slow."
Their discoverywas enabled bydeployment of highly sensitive earthquake monitoringnetworks. Slow earthquakes are slow in a systematic way that leads usto define them as a new earthquake category in much the same way that astronomers categorized main-sequence and off-main-sequence stars nearly a century ago.
Unlike ordinary earthquakes,whichgrow explosively in size with increasing duration, slow earthquakes, whether large or small, grow at a constant rate. They occur on the deepextension of large faults - a location that is "strategic" because it adjoinsthe part of the faults that generate the more familiar, and dangerous,"ordinary" earthquakes. Slow earthquakes have the potential to triggerlarge earthquakes. For this reason alone they merit intense study.
Theirrecent discovery also points out that there is much still have to learn aboutearthquakes, and that earthquake science is still a field where fundamentaldiscoveries can be expected.
Dr. Miaki Ishii
Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Harvard Seismology Group
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Imaging the Japan Earthquake
From 5000 Miles Away
The disastrous magnitude 9 Japanese earthquake of 2011 caused much damage along the northeastern coast of mainland Japan, but the energy from this earthquake reached every corner of the world.
The recordings of the earthquake in North America by nearly 500 seismometers, therefore, contain valuable information about the earthquake such as how it started and why it became so large. We unravel the data to reconstruct how the magnitude 9 earthquake happened as seen from 5000 miles away.
In particular, data from EarthScope’s USArray, a group of 400 seismic stations covering a strip extending from the Canadian border to the Mexican border, are rich in complex signals. USArray acts as a powerful telescope that shows us the details and mysteries associated with this earthquake.
One of the surprising results is the cascading failure of different faults in the region before, during and after the earthquake. This suggests that the event could have been much larger, at magnitude 9.2, releasing twice as much energy and potentially more hazardous than the already devastating event on March 11th.
2012 IRIS/SSA Distinguished Lecture Series