From “Science News” : “Here is how olivine may trigger deep earthquakes”

From “Science News”

9.26.22
Nikk Ogasa

The transformation of olivine (the yellow-green mineral seen in this rock) into wadsleyite hundreds of kilometers underground may set off the deepest earthquakes ever recorded. Credit: Joel Papalini/iStock/Getty Images Plus.

Cocooned within the bowels of the Earth, one mineral’s metamorphosis into another may trigger some of the deepest earthquakes ever detected.

These cryptic tremors — known as deep-focus earthquakes — are a seismic conundrum. They violently rupture at depths greater than 300 kilometers, where intense temperatures and pressures are thought to force rocks to flow smoothly. Now, experiments suggest that those same hellish conditions might also sometimes transform olivine — the primary mineral in Earth’s mantle — into the mineral wadsleyite. This mineral switch-up can destabilize the surrounding rock, enabling earthquakes at otherwise impossible depths, mineral physicist Tomohiro Ohuchi and colleagues report September 15 in Nature Communications [below].

“It’s been a real puzzle for many scientists because earthquakes shouldn’t occur deeper than 300 kilometers,” says Ohuchi, of Ehime University in Matsuyama, Japan.

Fig. 1: Summary of experimental conditions.

a Throughgoing faulting occurred. b No throughgoing faulting occurred. The long-dashed arrows indicate the P-T-t paths for our experiments. Squares, triangles, and diamonds represent the P-T-t path#1 (normal), #2 (overpressurized just before the deformation), and #3 (temperature ramping during the deformation), respectively. Large symbols represent the runs with throughgoing faulting (M2676, M3100, and M3425). Crosses show the lower limit of the peak temperature during the throughgoing faulting (estimated from the microstructures: see text for details). Short dashed lines are the estimated T-paths of shear heating. Red thick arrows show the temperature ranges during each deformation run of path#3. Solid and open symbols represent the runs in which the OL100 and OL92 samples were used, respectively. The equilibrium boundaries of α (olivine), β (wadsleyite), and γ (ringwoodite) for Mg1.8Fe0.2SiO4 are shown by gray solid lines14,34. Pale orange curve: solidus for dry lherzolite26. Dark-orange curve: liquidus for dry lherzolite26. Brown curve: melting of forsterite25. Pink curve: incongruent melting of γ-Fe2SiO4 to a liquid phase and stishovite (Sti)24 (i.e., the lower limit of the melting temperature of β/γ-Mg1.8Fe0.2SiO4). The M2472 run, in which a blow-out occurred in the early stage of deformation, is not shown.

Fig. 2: Summary of experimental results as a function of temperature.

a Temperature dependence of the yield strength of the samples. Creep strength of olivine (Ol) is calculated assuming the Peierls creep for sintered dry/wet aggregates15,16,17, wet dislocation (disl.) creep18 and wet dislocation-accommodated grain boundary sliding (dislGBS; for a typical grain size of 10 µm)19. Water content of 190 wt. ppm is assumed for the calculations. b Temperature dependence of averaged acoustic emission (AE) rate (symbols) and cumulative AE energy release (gray bars). Symbols and red thick-arrows are the same as those in Fig. 1. The error bars represent the uncertainties in temperature or stress.

More instructive images are available in the science paper.

Deep-focus earthquakes usually occur at subduction zones where tectonic plates made of oceanic crust — rich in olivine — plunge toward the mantle (SN: 1/13/21). Since the quakes’ seismic waves lose strength during their long ascent to the surface, they aren’t typically dangerous. But that doesn’t mean the quakes aren’t sometimes powerful. In 2013, a magnitude 8.3 deep-focus quake struck around 609 kilometers below the Sea of Okhotsk, just off Russia’s eastern coast.

Past studies [Nature Letters (below)] hinted that unstable olivine crystals could spawn deep quakes. But those studies tested other minerals that were similar in composition to olivine but deform at lower pressures, Ohuchi says, or the experiments didn’t strain samples enough to form faults.

He and his team decided to put olivine itself to the test. To replicate conditions deep underground, the researchers heated and squeezed olivine crystals up to nearly 1100° Celsius and 17 gigapascals. Then the team used a mechanical press to further compress the olivine slowly and monitored the deformation.

From 11 to 17 gigapascals and about 800° to 900° C, the olivine recrystallized into thin layers containing new wadsleyite and smaller olivine grains. The researchers also found tiny faults and recorded bursts of sound waves — indicative of miniature earthquakes. Along subducting tectonic plates, many of these thin layers grow and link to form weak regions in the rock, upon which faults and earthquakes can initiate, the researchers suggest.

“The transformation really wreaks havoc with the [rock’s] mechanical stability,” says geophysicist Pamela Burnley of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved in the research. The findings help confirm that olivine transformations are enabling deep-focus earthquakes, she says.

Next, Ohuchi’s team plans to experiment on olivine at even higher pressures to gain insights into the mineral’s deformation at greater depths.

Science paper:
Nature Communications
Nature Letters

See the full article here .

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From The University of Washington And The University of Texas-Austin: “Deepest scientific ocean drilling effort sheds light on Japan’s next ‘big one’ “

From The University of Washington

And

The University of Texas-Austin

9.22.22

The deep-sea scientific drilling vessel Chikyu, which in 2018 performed the deepest drilling of a subduction zone earthquake fault. Credit: Wikimedia/Gleam.

Scientists who drilled deeper into an undersea earthquake fault than ever before have found that the tectonic stress in Japan’s Nankai subduction zone is less than expected.

The results of the study led by the University of Washington and the University of Texas at Austin, published Sept. 5 in Geology [below], are a puzzle, since the fault produces a great earthquake almost every century and was thought to be building for another big one.

Although the Nankai fault has been stuck for decades, the findings reveal that it is not yet showing major signs of pent-up tectonic stress. Authors say the result doesn’t alter the long-term outlook for the fault, which last ruptured in 1946, when it caused a tsunami that killed thousands, and is expected to do so again during the next 50 years.

The findings will help scientists home in on the link between tectonic forces and the earthquake cycle. This could potentially lead to better earthquake forecasts, both at Nankai and other megathrust faults, like the Cascadia subduction zone off the coast of Washington and Oregon.

Cascadia subduction zone

Cascadia plate zones.

Harold Tobin of the University Washington inspects drilling pipes. Researchers used similar equipment during a record-breaking attempt to drill Japan’s Nankai fault in 2018. Credit: University of Washington.

“Right now, we have no way of knowing if the big one for Cascadia — a magnitude-9 scale earthquake and tsunami — will happen this afternoon or 200 years from now,” said lead author Harold Tobin, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences and co-chief scientist on the drilling expedition. “But I have some optimism that with more and more direct observations like this one from Japan we can start to recognize when something anomalous is occurring and that the risk of an earthquake is heightened in a way that could help people prepare.

“We learn how these faults work by studying them all over the world, and that knowledge will directly translate into insight into the Cascadia hazard as well.”

Megathrust faults such as Nankai and Cascadia, and the tsunamis they generate, are among the most powerful and damaging on the globe. Scientists say they currently have no reliable way of knowing when and where the next big one will hit.

The hope is that by directly measuring the force felt between tectonic plates pushing on each other — tectonic stress — scientists can learn when a great earthquake is ready to happen.

“This is the heart of the subduction zone, right above where the fault is locked, where the expectation was that the system should be storing energy between earthquakes,” said co-author Demian Saffer at University of Texas-Austin, who also co-led the scientific drilling expedition. “It changes the way we’re thinking about stress in these systems.”

The nature of tectonics means that the great earthquake faults are found in deep ocean, miles under the seafloor, making them incredibly challenging to measure directly. Tobin and Saffer’s drilling expedition is the closest scientists have come.

Their record-breaking feat took place in 2018 aboard a Japanese scientific drilling ship, the Chikyu, which drilled almost 2 miles, or just over 3 kilometers, into the tectonic plate before the borehole got too unstable to continue — 1 mile short of the fault.

Nevertheless, the researchers gathered invaluable data about subsurface conditions near the fault, including stress. To do that, they measured how much the borehole changed shape as the Earth squeezed it from the sides, then pumped water to see what it took to force its walls back out. That told them the direction and strength of horizontal stress felt by the plate pushing on the fault.

Contrary to predictions, the horizontal stress expected to have built up since the most recent great earthquake was close to zero, as if the system had already released its pent-up energy.

The researchers suggested several explanations: It could be that the fault simply needs less pent-up energy than thought to slip in a big earthquake, or that the stresses are lurking nearer to the fault than the drilling reached. Or it could be that the tectonic push will come suddenly in the coming years. Either way, the researchers said the drilling showed the need for further investigation and long-term monitoring of the fault.

“Findings like this can seem like they muddy the picture, because things aren’t as simple as our theory or models predicted they were,” Tobin said. “But that just means we’re gaining more understanding of how the real world works, and the real world is messy and complicated.”

The research was funded by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, or JAMSTEC. Other co-authors are Takehiro Hirose at JAMSTEC and David Castillo at Insight GeoMechanics in Australia.

Science paper:
Geology

See the full article here .

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University of Texas-Austin

University of Texas-Austin campus

The University of Texas-Austin is a public research university in Austin, Texas and the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, the University of Texas was inducted into the Association of American Universities in 1929, becoming only the third university in the American South to be elected. The institution has the nation’s seventh-largest single-campus enrollment, with over 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students and over 24,000 faculty and staff.

A Public Ivy, it is a major center for academic research. The university houses seven museums and seventeen libraries, including the LBJ Presidential Library and the Blanton Museum of Art, and operates various auxiliary research facilities, such as the J. J. Pickle Research Campus and the McDonald Observatory. As of November 2020, 13 Nobel Prize winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, two Turing Award winners, two Fields medalists, two Wolf Prize winners, and two Abel prize winners have been affiliated with the school as alumni, faculty members or researchers. The university has also been affiliated with three Primetime Emmy Award winners, and has produced a total of 143 Olympic medalists.

Student-athletes compete as the Texas Longhorns and are members of the Big 12 Conference. Its Longhorn Network is the only sports network featuring the college sports of a single university. The Longhorns have won four NCAA Division I National Football Championships, six NCAA Division I National Baseball Championships, thirteen NCAA Division I National Men’s Swimming and Diving Championships, and has claimed more titles in men’s and women’s sports than any other school in the Big 12 since the league was founded in 1996.

Establishment

The first mention of a public university in Texas can be traced to the 1827 constitution for the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. Although Title 6, Article 217 of the Constitution promised to establish public education in the arts and sciences, no action was taken by the Mexican government. After Texas obtained its independence from Mexico in 1836, the Texas Congress adopted the Constitution of the Republic, which, under Section 5 of its General Provisions, stated “It shall be the duty of Congress, as soon as circumstances will permit, to provide, by law, a general system of education.”

On April 18, 1838, “An Act to Establish the University of Texas” was referred to a special committee of the Texas Congress, but was not reported back for further action. On January 26, 1839, the Texas Congress agreed to set aside fifty leagues of land—approximately 288,000 acres (117,000 ha)—towards the establishment of a publicly funded university. In addition, 40 acres (16 ha) in the new capital of Austin were reserved and designated “College Hill”. (The term “Forty Acres” is colloquially used to refer to the University as a whole. The original 40 acres is the area from Guadalupe to Speedway and 21st Street to 24th Street.)

In 1845, Texas was annexed into the United States. The state’s Constitution of 1845 failed to mention higher education. On February 11, 1858, the Seventh Texas Legislature approved O.B. 102, an act to establish the University of Texas, which set aside $100,000 in United States bonds toward construction of the state’s first publicly funded university (the $100,000 was an allocation from the $10 million the state received pursuant to the Compromise of 1850 and Texas’s relinquishing claims to lands outside its present boundaries). The legislature also designated land reserved for the encouragement of railroad construction toward the university’s endowment. On January 31, 1860, the state legislature, wanting to avoid raising taxes, passed an act authorizing the money set aside for the University of Texas to be used for frontier defense in west Texas to protect settlers from Indian attacks.

Texas’s secession from the Union and the American Civil War delayed repayment of the borrowed monies. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, The University of Texas’s endowment was just over $16,000 in warrants and nothing substantive had been done to organize the university’s operations. This effort to establish a University was again mandated by Article 7, Section 10 of the Texas Constitution of 1876 which directed the legislature to “establish, organize and provide for the maintenance, support and direction of a university of the first class, to be located by a vote of the people of this State, and styled “The University of Texas”.

Additionally, Article 7, Section 11 of the 1876 Constitution established the Permanent University Fund, a sovereign wealth fund managed by the Board of Regents of the University of Texas and dedicated to the maintenance of the university. Because some state legislators perceived an extravagance in the construction of academic buildings of other universities, Article 7, Section 14 of the Constitution expressly prohibited the legislature from using the state’s general revenue to fund construction of university buildings. Funds for constructing university buildings had to come from the university’s endowment or from private gifts to the university, but the university’s operating expenses could come from the state’s general revenues.

The 1876 Constitution also revoked the endowment of the railroad lands of the Act of 1858, but dedicated 1,000,000 acres (400,000 ha) of land, along with other property appropriated for the university, to the Permanent University Fund. This was greatly to the detriment of the university as the lands the Constitution of 1876 granted the university represented less than 5% of the value of the lands granted to the university under the Act of 1858 (the lands close to the railroads were quite valuable, while the lands granted the university were in far west Texas, distant from sources of transportation and water). The more valuable lands reverted to the fund to support general education in the state (the Special School Fund).

On April 10, 1883, the legislature supplemented the Permanent University Fund with another 1,000,000 acres (400,000 ha) of land in west Texas granted to the Texas and Pacific Railroad but returned to the state as seemingly too worthless to even survey. The legislature additionally appropriated $256,272.57 to repay the funds taken from the university in 1860 to pay for frontier defense and for transfers to the state’s General Fund in 1861 and 1862. The 1883 grant of land increased the land in the Permanent University Fund to almost 2.2 million acres. Under the Act of 1858, the university was entitled to just over 1,000 acres (400 ha) of land for every mile of railroad built in the state. Had the 1876 Constitution not revoked the original 1858 grant of land, by 1883, the university lands would have totaled 3.2 million acres, so the 1883 grant was to restore lands taken from the university by the 1876 Constitution, not an act of munificence.

On March 30, 1881, the legislature set forth the university’s structure and organization and called for an election to establish its location. By popular election on September 6, 1881, Austin (with 30,913 votes) was chosen as the site. Galveston, having come in second in the election (with 20,741 votes), was designated the location of the medical department (Houston was third with 12,586 votes). On November 17, 1882, on the original “College Hill,” an official ceremony commemorated the laying of the cornerstone of the Old Main building. University President Ashbel Smith, presiding over the ceremony, prophetically proclaimed “Texas holds embedded in its earth rocks and minerals which now lie idle because unknown, resources of incalculable industrial utility, of wealth and power. Smite the earth, smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth.” The University of Texas officially opened its doors on September 15, 1883.

Expansion and growth

In 1890, George Washington Brackenridge donated $18,000 for the construction of a three-story brick mess hall known as Brackenridge Hall (affectionately known as “B.Hall”), one of the university’s most storied buildings and one that played an important place in university life until its demolition in 1952.

The old Victorian-Gothic Main Building served as the central point of the campus’s 40-acre (16 ha) site, and was used for nearly all purposes. But by the 1930s, discussions arose about the need for new library space, and the Main Building was razed in 1934 over the objections of many students and faculty. The modern-day tower and Main Building were constructed in its place.

In 1910, George Washington Brackenridge again displayed his philanthropy, this time donating 500 acres (200 ha) on the Colorado River to the university. A vote by the regents to move the campus to the donated land was met with outrage, and the land has only been used for auxiliary purposes such as graduate student housing. Part of the tract was sold in the late-1990s for luxury housing, and there are controversial proposals to sell the remainder of the tract. The Brackenridge Field Laboratory was established on 82 acres (33 ha) of the land in 1967.

In 1916, Gov. James E. Ferguson became involved in a serious quarrel with the University of Texas. The controversy grew out of the board of regents’ refusal to remove certain faculty members whom the governor found objectionable. When Ferguson found he could not have his way, he vetoed practically the entire appropriation for the university. Without sufficient funding, the university would have been forced to close its doors. In the middle of the controversy, Ferguson’s critics brought to light a number of irregularities on the part of the governor. Eventually, the Texas House of Representatives prepared 21 charges against Ferguson, and the Senate convicted him on 10 of them, including misapplication of public funds and receiving $156,000 from an unnamed source. The Texas Senate removed Ferguson as governor and declared him ineligible to hold office.

In 1921, the legislature appropriated $1.35 million for the purchase of land next to the main campus. However, expansion was hampered by the restriction against using state revenues to fund construction of university buildings as set forth in Article 7, Section 14 of the Constitution. With the completion of Santa Rita No. 1 well and the discovery of oil on university-owned lands in 1923, the university added significantly to its Permanent University Fund. The additional income from Permanent University Fund investments allowed for bond issues in 1931 and 1947, which allowed the legislature to address funding for the university along with the Agricultural and Mechanical College (now known as Texas A&M University). With sufficient funds to finance construction on both campuses, on April 8, 1931, the Forty Second Legislature passed H.B. 368. which dedicated the Agricultural and Mechanical College a 1/3 interest in the Available University Fund, the annual income from Permanent University Fund investments.

The University of Texas was inducted into The Association of American Universities in 1929. During World War II, the University of Texas was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission.

In 1950, following Sweatt v. Painter, the University of Texas was the first major university in the South to accept an African-American student. John S. Chase went on to become the first licensed African-American architect in Texas.

In the fall of 1956, the first black students entered the university’s undergraduate class. Black students were permitted to live in campus dorms, but were barred from campus cafeterias. The University of Texas integrated its facilities and desegregated its dorms in 1965. UT, which had had an open admissions policy, adopted standardized testing for admissions in the mid-1950s at least in part as a conscious strategy to minimize the number of Black undergraduates, given that they were no longer able to simply bar their entry after the Brown decision.

Following growth in enrollment after World War II, the university unveiled an ambitious master plan in 1960 designed for “10 years of growth” that was intended to “boost the University of Texas into the ranks of the top state universities in the nation.” In 1965, the Texas Legislature granted the university Board of Regents to use eminent domain to purchase additional properties surrounding the original 40 acres (160,000 m^2). The university began buying parcels of land to the north, south, and east of the existing campus, particularly in the Blackland neighborhood to the east and the Brackenridge tract to the southeast, in hopes of using the land to relocate the university’s intramural fields, baseball field, tennis courts, and parking lots.

On March 6, 1967, the Sixtieth Texas Legislature changed the university’s official name from “The University of Texas” to “The University of Texas at Austin” to reflect the growth of the University of Texas System.

Recent history

The first presidential library on a university campus was dedicated on May 22, 1971, with former President Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson and then-President Richard Nixon in attendance. Constructed on the eastern side of the main campus, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum is one of 13 presidential libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration.

A statue of Martin Luther King Jr. was unveiled on campus in 1999 and subsequently vandalized. By 2004, John Butler, a professor at the McCombs School of Business suggested moving it to Morehouse College, a historically black college, “a place where he is loved”.

The University of Texas-Austin has experienced a wave of new construction recently with several significant buildings. On April 30, 2006, the school opened the Blanton Museum of Art. In August 2008, the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center opened, with the hotel and conference center forming part of a new gateway to the university. Also in 2008, Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium was expanded to a seating capacity of 100,119, making it the largest stadium (by capacity) in the state of Texas at the time.

The University of Washington is one of the world’s preeminent public universities. Our impact on individuals, on our region, and on the world is profound — whether we are launching young people into a boundless future or confronting the grand challenges of our time through undaunted research and scholarship. Ranked number 10 in the world in Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings and educating more than 54,000 students annually, our students and faculty work together to turn ideas into impact and in the process transform lives and our world. For more about our impact on the world, every day.

So what defines us —the students, faculty and community members at the University of Washington? Above all, it’s our belief in possibility and our unshakable optimism. It’s a connection to others, both near and far. It’s a hunger that pushes us to tackle challenges and pursue progress. It’s the conviction that together we can create a world of good. Join us on the journey.

The University of Washington is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in downtown Seattle approximately a decade after the city’s founding to aid its economic development. Today, the university’s 703-acre main Seattle campus is in the University District above the Montlake Cut, within the urban Puget Sound region of the Pacific Northwest. The university has additional campuses in Tacoma and Bothell. Overall, University of Washington encompasses over 500 buildings and over 20 million gross square footage of space, including one of the largest library systems in the world with more than 26 university libraries, as well as the UW Tower, lecture halls, art centers, museums, laboratories, stadiums, and conference centers. The university offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees through 140 departments in various colleges and schools, sees a total student enrollment of roughly 46,000 annually, and functions on a quarter system.

University of Washington is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation, UW spent $1.41 billion on research and development in 2018, ranking it 5th in the nation. As the flagship institution of the six public universities in Washington state, it is known for its medical, engineering and scientific research as well as its highly competitive computer science and engineering programs. Additionally, University of Washington continues to benefit from its deep historic ties and major collaborations with numerous technology giants in the region, such as Amazon, Boeing, Nintendo, and particularly Microsoft. Paul G. Allen, Bill Gates and others spent significant time at Washington computer labs for a startup venture before founding Microsoft and other ventures. The University of Washington’s 22 varsity sports teams are also highly competitive, competing as the Huskies in the Pac-12 Conference of the NCAA Division I, representing the United States at the Olympic Games, and other major competitions.

The university has been affiliated with many notable alumni and faculty, including 21 Nobel Prize laureates and numerous Pulitzer Prize winners, Fulbright Scholars, Rhodes Scholars and Marshall Scholars.

In 1854, territorial governor Isaac Stevens recommended the establishment of a university in the Washington Territory. Prominent Seattle-area residents, including Methodist preacher Daniel Bagley, saw this as a chance to add to the city’s potential and prestige. Bagley learned of a law that allowed United States territories to sell land to raise money in support of public schools. At the time, Arthur A. Denny, one of the founders of Seattle and a member of the territorial legislature, aimed to increase the city’s importance by moving the territory’s capital from Olympia to Seattle. However, Bagley eventually convinced Denny that the establishment of a university would assist more in the development of Seattle’s economy. Two universities were initially chartered, but later the decision was repealed in favor of a single university in Lewis County provided that locally donated land was available. When no site emerged, Denny successfully petitioned the legislature to reconsider Seattle as a location in 1858.

In 1861, scouting began for an appropriate 10 acres (4 ha) site in Seattle to serve as a new university campus. Arthur and Mary Denny donated eight acres, while fellow pioneers Edward Lander, and Charlie and Mary Terry, donated two acres on Denny’s Knoll in downtown Seattle. More specifically, this tract was bounded by 4th Avenue to the west, 6th Avenue to the east, Union Street to the north, and Seneca Streets to the south.

John Pike, for whom Pike Street is named, was the university’s architect and builder. It was opened on November 4, 1861, as the Territorial University of Washington. The legislature passed articles incorporating the University, and establishing its Board of Regents in 1862. The school initially struggled, closing three times: in 1863 for low enrollment, and again in 1867 and 1876 due to funds shortage. University of Washington awarded its first graduate Clara Antoinette McCarty Wilt in 1876, with a bachelor’s degree in science.

19th century relocation

By the time Washington state entered the Union in 1889, both Seattle and the University had grown substantially. University of Washington’s total undergraduate enrollment increased from 30 to nearly 300 students, and the campus’s relative isolation in downtown Seattle faced encroaching development. A special legislative committee, headed by University of Washington graduate Edmond Meany, was created to find a new campus to better serve the growing student population and faculty. The committee eventually selected a site on the northeast of downtown Seattle called Union Bay, which was the land of the Duwamish, and the legislature appropriated funds for its purchase and construction. In 1895, the University relocated to the new campus by moving into the newly built Denny Hall. The University Regents tried and failed to sell the old campus, eventually settling with leasing the area. This would later become one of the University’s most valuable pieces of real estate in modern-day Seattle, generating millions in annual revenue with what is now called the Metropolitan Tract. The original Territorial University building was torn down in 1908, and its former site now houses the Fairmont Olympic Hotel.

The sole-surviving remnants of Washington’s first building are four 24-foot (7.3 m), white, hand-fluted cedar, Ionic columns. They were salvaged by Edmond S. Meany, one of the University’s first graduates and former head of its history department. Meany and his colleague, Dean Herbert T. Condon, dubbed the columns as “Loyalty,” “Industry,” “Faith”, and “Efficiency”, or “LIFE.” The columns now stand in the Sylvan Grove Theater.

20th century expansion

Organizers of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition eyed the still largely undeveloped campus as a prime setting for their world’s fair. They came to an agreement with Washington’s Board of Regents that allowed them to use the campus grounds for the exposition, surrounding today’s Drumheller Fountain facing towards Mount Rainier. In exchange, organizers agreed Washington would take over the campus and its development after the fair’s conclusion. This arrangement led to a detailed site plan and several new buildings, prepared in part by John Charles Olmsted. The plan was later incorporated into the overall University of Washington campus master plan, permanently affecting the campus layout.

Both World Wars brought the military to campus, with certain facilities temporarily lent to the federal government. In spite of this, subsequent post-war periods were times of dramatic growth for the University. The period between the wars saw a significant expansion of the upper campus. Construction of the Liberal Arts Quadrangle, known to students as “The Quad,” began in 1916 and continued to 1939. The University’s architectural centerpiece, Suzzallo Library, was built in 1926 and expanded in 1935.

After World War II, further growth came with the G.I. Bill. Among the most important developments of this period was the opening of the School of Medicine in 1946, which is now consistently ranked as the top medical school in the United States. It would eventually lead to the University of Washington Medical Center, ranked by U.S. News and World Report as one of the top ten hospitals in the nation.

In 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry in the Seattle area were forced into inland internment camps as part of Executive Order 9066 following the attack on Pearl Harbor. During this difficult time, university president Lee Paul Sieg took an active and sympathetic leadership role in advocating for and facilitating the transfer of Japanese American students to universities and colleges away from the Pacific Coast to help them avoid the mass incarceration. Nevertheless, many Japanese American students and “soon-to-be” graduates were unable to transfer successfully in the short time window or receive diplomas before being incarcerated. It was only many years later that they would be recognized for their accomplishments during the University of Washington’s Long Journey Home ceremonial event that was held in May 2008.

From 1958 to 1973, the University of Washington saw a tremendous growth in student enrollment, its faculties and operating budget, and also its prestige under the leadership of Charles Odegaard. University of Washington student enrollment had more than doubled to 34,000 as the baby boom generation came of age. However, this era was also marked by high levels of student activism, as was the case at many American universities. Much of the unrest focused around civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. In response to anti-Vietnam War protests by the late 1960s, the University Safety and Security Division became the University of Washington Police Department.

Odegaard instituted a vision of building a “community of scholars”, convincing the Washington State legislatures to increase investment in the University. Washington senators, such as Henry M. Jackson and Warren G. Magnuson, also used their political clout to gather research funds for the University of Washington. The results included an increase in the operating budget from $37 million in 1958 to over $400 million in 1973, solidifying University of Washington as a top recipient of federal research funds in the United States. The establishment of technology giants such as Microsoft, Boeing and Amazon in the local area also proved to be highly influential in the University of Washington’s fortunes, not only improving graduate prospects but also helping to attract millions of dollars in university and research funding through its distinguished faculty and extensive alumni network.

21st century

In 1990, the University of Washington opened its additional campuses in Bothell and Tacoma. Although originally intended for students who have already completed two years of higher education, both schools have since become four-year universities with the authority to grant degrees. The first freshman classes at these campuses started in fall 2006. Today both Bothell and Tacoma also offer a selection of master’s degree programs.

In 2012, the University began exploring plans and governmental approval to expand the main Seattle campus, including significant increases in student housing, teaching facilities for the growing student body and faculty, as well as expanded public transit options. The University of Washington light rail station was completed in March 2015, connecting Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood to the University of Washington Husky Stadium within five minutes of rail travel time. It offers a previously unavailable option of transportation into and out of the campus, designed specifically to reduce dependence on private vehicles, bicycles and local King County buses.

University of Washington has been listed as a “Public Ivy” in Greene’s Guides since 2001, and is an elected member of the American Association of Universities. Among the faculty by 2012, there have been 151 members of American Association for the Advancement of Science, 68 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 67 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 53 members of the National Academy of Medicine, 29 winners of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, 21 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 15 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators, 15 MacArthur Fellows, 9 winners of the Gairdner Foundation International Award, 5 winners of the National Medal of Science, 7 Nobel Prize laureates, 5 winners of Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research, 4 members of the American Philosophical Society, 2 winners of the National Book Award, 2 winners of the National Medal of Arts, 2 Pulitzer Prize winners, 1 winner of the Fields Medal, and 1 member of the National Academy of Public Administration. Among UW students by 2012, there were 136 Fulbright Scholars, 35 Rhodes Scholars, 7 Marshall Scholars and 4 Gates Cambridge Scholars. UW is recognized as a top producer of Fulbright Scholars, ranking 2nd in the US in 2017.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has consistently ranked University of Washington as one of the top 20 universities worldwide every year since its first release. In 2019, University of Washington ranked 14th worldwide out of 500 by the ARWU, 26th worldwide out of 981 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and 28th worldwide out of 101 in the Times World Reputation Rankings. Meanwhile, QS World University Rankings ranked it 68th worldwide, out of over 900.

U.S. News & World Report ranked University of Washington 8th out of nearly 1,500 universities worldwide for 2021, with University of Washington’s undergraduate program tied for 58th among 389 national universities in the U.S. and tied for 19th among 209 public universities.

In 2019, it ranked 10th among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings. In 2017, the Leiden Ranking, which focuses on science and the impact of scientific publications among the world’s 500 major universities, ranked University of Washington 12th globally and 5th in the U.S.

In 2019, Kiplinger Magazine’s review of “top college values” named University of Washington 5th for in-state students and 10th for out-of-state students among U.S. public colleges, and 84th overall out of 500 schools. In the Washington Monthly National University Rankings University of Washington was ranked 15th domestically in 2018, based on its contribution to the public good as measured by social mobility, research, and promoting public service.

From “temblor” : “Taiwan earthquake sequence may signal future shocks”

From “temblor”

9.26.22
Shinji Toda, Ph.D., IRIDeS, Tohoku University
Ross S. Stein, Ph.D., Temblor, Inc.

The east coast of Taiwan is among the most seismically active sites in the world. Fifteen events of magnitude 6.5 or larger that have struck in the past 85 years, several of which occurred as sequences. On Sept. 17, a magnitude-6.5 quake struck, followed 17 hours later by a magnitude-6.9 quake 10 kilometers (6 miles) away. In retrospect, we can say that the 6.5 event was a large foreshock. Together, these events have loaded adjacent faults, and so the sequence may not be over.

A foreshock strikes adjacent fault

As always, we don’t know a quake is a foreshock until a larger one strikes soon thereafter. There was nothing about the magnitude 6.5 that marked it for future greatness. In this way, one can think of the mainshock as an “over-achieving aftershock,” in that it was larger than its mainshock —in this case, four times larger.

These two earthquakes don’t appear to have struck the same fault, which may mean that the foreshock brought the adjacent fault closer to failure. The foreshock appears to have slipped a patch of the Longitudinal Valley Fault, which is inclined to the east, whereas the mainshock appears to have slipped the Central Range Structure Fault, inclined to the west. The Longitudinal Valley Fault, and perhaps both, partially creep, and so only a portion of their slip is accommodated by earthquakes (Hsu and Bürgmann, 2006).

Aftershocks during the first three days of the earthquake sequence, with the Longitudinal Valley Fault strands in red (left panel). The USGS model of where the slip was concentrated is shown in the right panel, along with slip in the 2003 magnitude-6.8 shock from Thomas et al. (2014).

These faults are a product of the rapid western convergence of the Philippine Sea Plate with the island of Taiwan (part of the Eurasian Plate). Both faults have high slip rates and, based on their lengths and earthquake history, both are capable of still larger shocks than those that occurred on September 17 (Chan et al., 2020).

Taiwan is caught in a plate tectonic vice, with the Philippine Sea Plate colliding with Taiwan along the Longitudinal Valley Fault and the Eurasian Plate colliding with the island on its west coast (from Thomas et al., 2014).

How likely is a magnitude-6.9 shock here?

The answer is “very.” Temblor’s Global Earthquake Activity Rate (T-GEAR) model provides an answer. T-GEAR is a blend of strain rate measured from GPS and the past 117 years of quakes. One sees that the 2022 event struck in the most seismically active part of Taiwan, where quakes of this size have a return period or recurrence interval (the typical time between events) of about 25 years. In 1951, Taiwan suffered a storm of quakes along its east coast, with a half dozen magnitude-7.0 or larger quakes spread out over 150 kilometers (Chen et al., 2008). One also sees that a magnitude-6.8 event struck in 2003 very close to the current sequence.

The return period (the average time between quakes) for magnitude-6.9 quakes in Taiwan reveals the east coast to be the most seismically active on the island, consistent with the region’s history of large shocks (Chan et al. 2020) and its high strain rate as measured by GPS.

Could the M 6.9 also be a foreshock?

Foreshocks are rare; progressive mainshocks are more common (as in 1951), and aftershocks are ubiquitous. So, forecasting the distribution of aftershocks is tractable and valuable, even if they end up being smaller than the mainshock or the foreshock. We can calculate where the chances of subsequent shocks have increased as a result of the magnitude 6.9, and where they have decreased, using the theory of Coulomb stress transfer (Toda et al., 2011).

Faults brought closer to failure by the magnitude-6.9 rupture turn red (left panel). Faults are represented by the focal mechanisms (“beachballs”) of past magnitude-3.9 or larger earthquakes from the Taiwan BATS catalog (Institute of Earth Sciences, 1996). These stress changes, along with the background seismicity from 1996-2020, are used to forecast the number and distribution of magnitude-5 or larger earthquakes in the 30-day period beginning on Sept. 20, 2022 (right panel). We expect aftershocks to be concentrated along the coastal region adjacent to and along the Longitudinal Valley Fault system.

Temblor forecasts about 14 magnitude-5 or larger shocks in the next month. We use Realtime Risk (Toda and Stein, 2020) to calculate the Coulomb stress imparted by the mainshock to surrounding faults, and how the stress changes the quake rates over time. For this, we use the past seismicity and focal mechanisms from the BATS network (Institute of Earth Sciences, Academia Sinica, 1996). About one magnitude-5 or larger shock occurred in the past decade, whereas we forecast about 12 in the next 30 days, and perhaps one quake larger than magnitude 6. The quakes are expected near the epicenters of the magnitude-6.5 and -6.9 shocks, and also 60-75 kilometers to the north, at the northern edge of the magnitude-6.9 rupture. This might mean a re-rupturing of the fault or faults that slipped in the 1951 sequence. Given the ~25-year repeat time of magnitude-7 quakes in this region, the 70 years that has elapsed since 1951 would seem sufficient to recharge those faults and create conditions for subsequent events.

Bottom Line

Further mainshocks are, by no means, a certainty, but we can say this: They are more likely now than they were before September 17, and the region has a history of progressive earthquake sequences.

Acknowledgments

We thank our colleagues at E-DREaM, the Earthquake Disaster & Risk Evaluation and Management Center, National Central University, and the Institute of Earth Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, with whom we have collaborated for more than 20 years.

References

Chung-Han Chan, Kuo-Fong Ma, J Bruce H Shyu, Ya-Ting Lee, Yu-Ju Wang, Jia-Cian Gao, Yin-Tung Yen, Ruey-Juin Rau; Probabilistic seismic hazard assessment for Taiwan: TEM PSHA2020. Earthquake Spectra2020;; 36 (1_suppl): 137–159. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/8755293020951587

Chen, K. H., Toda, S., andRau, R. -J. (2008), A leaping, triggered sequence along a segmented fault: The 1951 ML 7.3 Hualien-Taitung earthquake sequence in eastern Taiwan, J. Geophys. Res., 113, B02304, doi:10.1029/2007JB005048.

Hsu, L., and Bürgmann, R. (2006), Surface creep along the Longitudinal Valley fault, Taiwan from InSAR measurements, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L06312, doi:10.1029/2005GL024624.

Institute of Earth Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan (1996): Broadband Array in Taiwan for Seismology. Institute of Earth Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Other/Seismic Network. doi:10.7914/SN/TW

Shinji Toda, Ross S. Stein; Long‐ and Short‐Term Stress Interaction of the 2019 Ridgecrest Sequence and Coulomb‐Based Earthquake Forecasts. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 2020; 110 (4): 1765–1780. doi: https://doi.org/10.1785/0120200169

Thomas, M. Y., Avouac, J.-P., Champenois, J., Lee, J.-C., and Kuo, L.-C. (2014), Spatiotemporal evolution of seismic and aseismic slip on the Longitudinal Valley Fault, Taiwan, J. Geophys. Res. Solid Earth, 119, 5114– 5139, doi:10.1002/2013JB010603.

Toda, Shinji, Stein, R.S., Sevilgen, Volkan, and Lin, Jian, 2011, Coulomb 3.3 Graphic-rich deformation and stress-change software for earthquake, tectonic, and volcano research and teaching—user guide: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2011–1060, 63 p., available at https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2011/1060/.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

___________________________________________________________________

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network projectEarthquake Network is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.

The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Get the app in the Google Play store.

Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015

Meet The Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.

After almost eight years at Stanford, and a year at CalTech, the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).

There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.

Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.

USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.

If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.

Below, the QCN Quake Catcher Network map

ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.

Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.

The primary project partners include:

United States Geological Survey
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES)
California Geological Survey
California Institute of Technology
University of California Berkeley
University of Washington
University of Oregon
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Earthquake Threat

Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.

Part of the Solution

Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.

Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.

System Goal

The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.

Current Status

The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.

In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.

This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.

Authorities

The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.

For More Information

Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach
rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225

Learn more about EEW Research

ShakeAlert Fact Sheet

ShakeAlert Implementation Plan

QuakeAlertUSA

About Early Warning Labs, LLC

Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.

EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.

EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.

EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.

EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.

Earthquake Early Warning Introduction

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.

ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.

ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Earthquake Early Warning Background

The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.

Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:

Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems

However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.

From “temblor” : “Magnitude-7.6 earthquake shakes coastal Mexico”

From “temblor”

9.19.22

A magnitude-7.6 quake struck along the western coast of Central Mexico at 1:05 p.m. local time on Monday. Photos of damage are filtering in.

Monday’s earthquake struck along the west coast.

Coincidentally, the quake fell on the anniversary of two other large earthquakes in the region: the 2017 Puebla earthquake and the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. It also came less than an hour after the country performed a memorial earthquake drill. Though many people may find the coincidence rather curious — that three intense earthquakes shook this region on September 19 of various years — there is no scientific significance to the date.

The likelihood of such a large earthquake striking is “totally independent of the month or the date,” says Hector Gonzales-Huizar, a seismologist at the Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada, Baja California. “Similar earthquakes have occurred in Mexico during different dates of the year.”

Two other earthquakes have struck in the recent past on Sept 19th. Scientists assure that the date is a coincidence.

The temblor likely occurred on a thrust fault, according to U.S. Geological survey calculations. Given the estimated depth of the event, which was relatively shallow at 23.5 kilometers (14.6 miles), it could have struck along the megathrust that separates the subducting Cocos tectonic plate from the North American Plate. Seismologists examining the event will provide more detail on the exact location of the quake in the coming days.

Earthquakes of this magnitude are not uncommon along Mexico’s tectonically active west coast.

Mexico is prone to strong shaking from earthquakes.

Tsunami waves are possible along coastal regions near the epicenter, according to the U.S. Tsunami Warning system. No threat is expected for areas farther out. Small tsunami waves are impacting coastal Mexico, and surges will likely continue for several hours. Any populations in the region should avoid the coast during that time.

This is a developing story.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network projectEarthquake Network is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.

The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Get the app in the Google Play store.

Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015

Meet The Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.

After almost eight years at Stanford, and a year at CalTech, the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).

There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.

Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.

USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.

If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.

Below, the QCN Quake Catcher Network map

ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.

Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.

The primary project partners include:

United States Geological Survey
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES)
California Geological Survey
California Institute of Technology
University of California Berkeley
University of Washington
University of Oregon
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Earthquake Threat

Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.

Part of the Solution

Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.

Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.

System Goal

The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.

Current Status

The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.

In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.

This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.

Authorities

The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.

For More Information

Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach
rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225

Learn more about EEW Research

ShakeAlert Fact Sheet

ShakeAlert Implementation Plan

QuakeAlertUSA

About Early Warning Labs, LLC

Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.

EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.

EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.

EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.

EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.

Earthquake Early Warning Introduction

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.

ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.

ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Earthquake Early Warning Background

The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.

Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:

Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems

However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.

From “WIRED“: “When the Big One Hits Portland Cargo Bikers Will Save You”

From “WIRED“

Sep 13, 2022
Adrienne So

The Pacific Northwest is due for a massive quake. I trained to help rescue efforts in the aftermath—by racing around the city on an electric kid hauler.

Cascadia subduction zone

Cascadia plate zones.

“The Rose Festival is Portland, Oregon’s biggest event of the year. There’s a waterfront carnival, a flower show, car races, and footraces. The marquee event is the Grand Floral Parade, a mile-long flower flotilla that stretches from one end of downtown to the other. And yet somehow—I blame Covid—I’d completely forgotten about it while racing across the city. I come to a dead stop on my electric cargo bike and shout “Oh my God!” in front of a large float with dancers in big flowered dresses blasting Latin music. People carrying lawn chairs and coolers stream around me. A cop looks on sympathetically.

I’m dirty, tired, and frazzled. Mud crusts my shins, my wet hiking boots, and my stretchy cycling outfit. Lashed on to my bike’s rear rack is an orange 5-gallon bucket along with a pannier containing rocks, a compass, a whistle, a grease pencil, and my rain jacket—which I don’t need, because I’m already drenched from exertion and anxiety. I’m in the final stretch of the Disaster Relief Trials, a 30-mile bike race wrapped in an apocalyptic post-earthquake scenario, and after hours of riding I’m stuck at a standstill. Everything’s OK, though—or at least, that’s what I’m telling myself. In a race like this, having things not go to plan is just part of the exercise.

The race is designed to simulate the conditions after a major disaster, and because this is Portland, that disaster will probably be the Big One: the magnitude 9.0-or-so earthquake that has a one-in-three chance of leveling the Pacific Northwest in the next half-century. I’ve lived in Portland for 15 years, long enough to know that most people prep for the quake to some degree. There are only around 12,000 first responders in the entire state of Oregon, but Portland alone is home to 650,000 residents. In other words, the first person to realize you’re trapped in the upper story of your rickety wood-framed house probably won’t be the professionally trained EMT who answers a 911 call. It will be your neighbor poking her head out of the window and grabbing a ladder out of the garage.

I never doubted my own ability to be that neighborhood hero. I did things like run 20 miles and scale rock cliffs for fun. For years, my own garage has been lined with milk crates full of backpacking and camping equipment, the same portable stoves and water bottles that the Oregon Office of Emergency Management recommends having on hand if you want to survive for two weeks off the grid. My husband lived through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina sitting on the beach for weeks, eating FEMA-distributed MREs. I figured that the weeks post-Big One would look similar, assuming we wouldn’t get crushed by the many teetering book piles around our house.

But then we had a kid, and after her first birthday we enrolled her in daycare. As I flipped through the parent handbook, skimming the guidelines on nut-free snacks and religious holidays, my eye stopped on page 19: emergency supplies. The instructions told me to pack boxed drinks, diapers, an emergency blanket, a jar of high-protein food, and a plastic poncho, all of which the school would store in a watertight container. The final item was a photograph of our family. “Add an encouraging note!” the handbook suggested.

I gamely found a blank card in my filing cabinet, printed out a picture, and started writing. “Hi baby!” I began, then stopped. What do you say to your toddler in the aftermath of a catastrophe? My daughter’s teachers were going to hand her a photo and a juice box, in the middle of a city in ruins, and tell her everything was going to be OK? Yeah, no. I would inflate a dinghy with my own lungs, I would paddle through flames, I would cross miles of smoking rubble to get to her.

Slowly, I started to make a plan. First, my husband and I had another baby, a son. We moved to a new house within walking distance of our kids’ school. I bought a 50-gallon water barrel. I pinged our neighborhood group chat to keep tabs on who had an emergency generator and vegetable garden. Then my husband—himself a bit of a catastrophist—started to fret that I wasn’t fast enough on my human-powered bike and trailer to pull our two toddlers out of harm’s way. So I bought an electric cargo bike, a cheery yellow Tern GSD S00 that my daughter, then 5, named Popsicle.

I learned about the Disaster Relief Trials from a friend earlier this year. The race is designed to mimic four days of chaos after catastrophe hits. It has the format of an alleycat, a type of unsanctioned street race that bike messengers ride in, with checkpoints all over the city and a laminated map on which race volunteers mark off tasks after they are completed. In the DRT, each of the tasks takes the form of obstacles that people volunteering relief in a disaster might encounter: rough terrain to traverse, rubble to clear, messages to deliver, water to carry. As in a real disaster, we won’t know what the route is or what we need to do until we’re handed our maps an hour before the start.

After the Big One, bridges will collapse. Debris, damaged roads, and a lack of fuel will make it impossible for emergency vehicles to pass. A bike, though, can go almost anywhere. In the decade since it was founded, the DRT has evolved from an event run mostly by pedal punks to a training exercise for the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management. Neighborhood emergency response teams work the race to serve their volunteer hours. As I read the website, I realized that I’d been preparing for this for years. I had a bike; I was ready. I signed up. It was only after a half-dozen people pointed out that I’d be carrying my own body weight in gear that I started to wonder whether I really could be the hero I thought I was.

[2] Credit:GRITCHELLE FALLESGON.

Mike Cobb, the founder of the Disaster Relief Trials, is a former bike mechanic. He got the idea for the race after watching footage of the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake. Bikes, he thought, could help solve a major transportation problem. After I signed up, I emailed Cobb with the frank admission that I had no idea how to load clunky gear onto my bike. He told me to meet him the following Tuesday in Cully Park, where the race starts and ends, at what he calls his weekly coffee klatch.

When I showed up on Popsicle, Cobb and some former participants were standing around the picnic tables. He offered me a hot coffee and an assortment of about 12 alternative milks. Cobb has unruly dark hair, a grizzled beard, and is lean in a sinewy, rubber-bandy biker way. His sense of humor, I soon learn, is bone-dry. He refers to me, his face completely deadpan, as “the embedded reporter.”

A bike is a highly personal piece of equipment, and Popsicle is the perfect commuter ebike for a mom with two kids. Other than my husband, I can’t imagine a better companion for the apocalypse. It’s a pedal-assist bike, sans throttle. Its wheels are small and its center of gravity is low, which means I can carry a lot of weight without tipping over. Its also compact—the same length as a road bike—so I can lift it over and around barriers. I’m not worried about it falling on me while we struggle through rough terrain, or about it failing to climb big hills, especially after I add a second battery.

I love Popsicle, but as I was seeing it through Cobb’s eyes I suddenly became aware of its shortcomings. It’s low to the ground, so it doesn’t get much clearance, and it’s heavy. Under Cobb’s tutelage, I gingerly wrapped cam buckle straps around a bucket and cinched it to Popsicle’s rack. Cobb lent me a kitchen mat as a secure cushion for a splintery shipping pallet that I balanced on the bike’s deck. Finally, I fixed everything in place with small, stretchy straps. As I pulled the straps tight, Popsicle almost fell over. I felt a little overwhelmed. I am just over five feet tall, and the bike and gear together amounted to more than 100 pounds. It occurred to me that I was more accustomed to hauling kid backpacks and groceries.

I wondered aloud whether I should switch to a pedal bike and trailer. Cobb did not disagree; clearly, my wobbly performance did not inspire confidence. When I finally worked up the courage to swing my leg over the bike for a test ride, Cobb retreated to a safe distance and shouted, “It will feel weird until you hit 8 miles per hour!”

I’d been wrong to doubt Popsicle, though. When I downshifted and put my foot on the pedal, power surged through the bike. Within a few pedal strokes, I was going fast enough to feel stable.

Every rider who completes the DRT’s full circuit gets a fun sticker that tells their neighborhood emergency team that they’ve gotten some emergency training. My next step was to see whether my own NET would find my skills useful. I looked this up the same way I do everything else—by posting to the local moms’ Facebook group and saying “Hello! Is anyone here in the NET!”

I love my neighborhood. Enthusiasm for my neighborhood makes up about 80 percent of my personality. It’s a quiet collection of wood-framed buildings originally built by workers at the nearby docks and manufacturing plants. The writers, musicians, pensioners, stay-at-home moms, bartenders, and pizza chefs who live here now haven’t yet been priced out. Our lawns may be a little rocky and weedy, but they’re lived-in—full of wild roses, clotheslines, toys, and strange statues. My grocery store, dive bar, coffee shop, post office, and pet store are all within a mile of my house.

My neighborhood is also uniquely vulnerable to earthquakes. We’re tucked into a narrow peninsula between two rivers, surrounded by trees, shipping yards, and an Amazon fulfillment center. A deep gully known as The Cut chops us off from the rest of the city. There are several bridges that span it, but in an earthquake those bridges will either fall down or become impassable, and we’ll be isolated. When a major earthquake hits, the park next to our community center will serve as our official gathering spot; you’re supposed to come there to ask the NET for help, or offer it. We’ll have to coordinate with each other to figure out how to get people and supplies back and forth around The Cut.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

From The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: “Cracking the Secrets to Earthquake Safety – One Shake Simulation at a Time”

From The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

9.15.22
Aliyah Kovner

A new experimental capability, designed to replicate realistic earthquakes in the laboratory, paired with the world’s fastest supercomputers, will help lead to resilient buildings and infrastructure across the U.S.

The Soil Box System, pictured during the assembly phase. (Credit: Eric Marks/University of Nevada-Reno)

To make sure our buildings and infrastructure are earthquake-safe, we must understand how seismic activity affects different structures. Miniature models and historical observations are helpful, but they only scratch the surface of understanding and quantifying a geological event as powerful and far-reaching as a major earthquake.

Two major research efforts funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) seek to fill in the gaps and provide resources for researchers and engineers to study earthquakes across scales, from the initiation of seismic waves at the fault rupture site deep underground, to the interactions between shaking soil and individual structures at the surface.

The first endeavor is an experimental facility for real-world studies on how the soil around a structure influences its performance during an earthquake. The ground beneath us may seem solid, but vibrations can quickly make it unstable. This is because soils are composed of complex layers of rock and mineral particles in varying sizes with varying levels of moisture that each respond differently to seismic activity. During an earthquake, the movements of buildings are dictated by site-specific interactions between these soil layers and the direction and strength of the vibrations. Now nearly complete after more than five years of design and construction, the Large-Scale Laminar Soil Box System will be the largest facility in the U.S. for studying these interactions, and comparable in size to the largest one in the world.

The Soil Box System, pictured during the assembly phase. (Dave McCallen/Berkeley Lab)

The facility is a collaboration between the University of Nevada, Reno (University) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). It consists of a 350-ton capacity soil container mounted on a hydraulic base that can replicate shaking with up to one-and-a-quarter million pounds of force. The facility will open with a celebratory demonstration event at the University on September 15.

Studies conducted with the Soil Box System will provide data for the other effort, EQSIM: an ongoing collaboration between scientists at Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University to develop realistic, highly detailed earthquake simulations using DOE’s supercomputers.

“These projects are synergistic. The Soil Box System is helping us understand and refine how to model the complex interaction between the soil and a structure. Our objective is to make realistic models of specific interactions – for example, what happens to a 20-story building very near California’s Hayward fault during a large-magnitude earthquake? – and add them to our existing large-scale simulations,” said David McCallen, a senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Area and EQSIM leader. “We want to model all the way from the fault rupture through the ground to the structure to see how buildings and other infrastructure in an entire region will respond.”

A new avenue for real-world testing

The soil box project was launched in 2015 out of a need to safeguard Department of Energy buildings that hold sensitive scientific instruments against any potential earthquake scenario. “It was driven by how little we knew about the way soil surrounding the foundation of a building affects its performance during an earthquake,” said Soil Box System principal investigator Ian Buckle, a Foundation professor in the University’s Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. “For buildings on shallow foundations, there’s probably not much effect. But for those with deeper foundations, such as nuclear facilities and long-span bridges, the answer is perhaps a great deal.”

The design team, led by Buckle and fellow University professors Sherif Elfass and Patrick Laplace, devised and fabricated the system to have the largest possible soil container, so that representative structures could be placed on top. A management committee was formed to help guide the team through this challenging project. In addition to those named above, the committee also comprised University Professors Ramin Motamed and Raj Siddharthan.

The 15-foot-high, 21.5-foot-wide box sits on a 24-foot square shaking platform controlled by 16 hydraulic actuators. The soil container has 19 layers, called laminates, that are each supported on elastomeric (rubber-like) bearings so that soil layers can move relative to each other like soil does during actual earthquakes. The system can displace and accelerate 350 tons of soil – and the structure on top – in two horizontal directions simultaneously with the same force as a strong earthquake, and is so powerful that the designers had to build in safeguards to prevent it from destroying itself during experiments. The hydraulics are controlled by custom software and the box is equipped with a suite of sensors so that the scientists can gather detailed datasets to feed into their computer simulations.

(Credit: David McCallen/Berkeley Lab)

“A soil box and shake table of this size and complexity are not something you order from an online catalog. There are very few organizations or companies with the knowledge and expertise to do this, so we decided to do it ourselves with our own expertise and resources,” said Buckle. “This design not only allows us to work with large-scale structural models that can be placed on top of the soil, but also the large-scale allows more realistic soil properties to be modeled.”

Once operational, the facility will become a resource for DOE researchers focused on seismic safety as well as scientists across academia and industry. James McConnell, Associate Principal Deputy Administrator in DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration, said: “It’s important for DOE and NNSA to invest in this work to ensure that the large, complicated, one-of-a-kind facilities we build are designed to protect the country’s research, defense, and energy-generation needs, but the findings have an added benefit of helping engineers and architects in industry and the private sector build a wide range of earthquake-resilient structures.”

Leveraging a new generation of supercomputers

Current models of earthquake properties rely on approximations and simplifications due, in part, to the lack of real-world data on the fundamental physics involved, but also because very few computers on the planet are actually capable of running earthquake simulations at the fidelity required to perform infrastructure damage assessments. That’s why McCallen and his EQSIM colleagues have been using the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Perlmutter supercomputer at Berkeley Lab to develop very large, detailed models – like their simulations of the San Francisco Bay Area for M7 Hayward fault earthquakes – which has 391 billion model grid points.

ORNL OLCF IBM Q AC922 SUMMIT supercomputer, was No.1 on the TOP500.

Cray Shasta Perlmutter SC18 AMD Epyc Nvidia pre-exascale supercomputer.

They will also soon start working on an even more capable platform – the newly launched Frontier supercomputer, also at Oak Ridge.

ORNL Cray Frontier Shasta based Exascale supercomputer with Slingshot interconnect featuring high-performance AMD EPYC CPU and AMD Radeon Instinct GPU technology, at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Frontier is the first computer system to break the exascale barrier, meaning that it is capable of calculating at least a billion billion (also known as a quintillion, or 1018) operations per second, and is currently ranked as the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

Using these exceptionally fast machines, the team will be able to add new insight and information on soil response and soil-structure interaction gained from the Soil Box experiments into their existing large-scale models. The longstanding goal of rupture-to-structure modeling is now becoming a computational reality. Their simulations will then be made available to the public through the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center’s open-access database of simulations. PEER is a multi-institution research center focused on performance-based earthquake engineering, led by UC Berkeley.

“Part of our plan is to be able to enhance the available data sets of measured earthquake motions with our very dense, very detailed simulated motions and make these motions available to the broad earthquake science and engineering communities,” explained McCallen, who is also the director the University of Nevada, Reno’s Center for Civil Earthquake Engineering Research. “And so we will collaborate with PEER, which has a long history and necessary infrastructure for providing open access to recorded earthquake ground motions so that they can share them freely with the entire community to the benefit of all. Because not everybody has a Frontier sitting on their desk.”

Simulation of Seismic Waves Propagating Throughout the San Francisco Bay.
This video shows a simulation of seismic waves propagating throughout the San Francisco Bay area during and after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake at the Hayward fault, alongside a simulation of the movement and damage of an individual building in the region – a modern design, 40-story steel frame building. The colors flashing on the structure correspond to damage, where green = no damage, yellow = limited permanent damage, orange = moderate permanent damage, and red = large permanent damage. The regional simulation was performed on the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the building damage simulation was performed at the Perlmutter supercomputer at Berkeley Lab. Credit: David McCallen/Berkeley Lab.

The Soil Box project has been supported by DOE’s Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security’s Nuclear Safety Research and Development Program, and by DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The EQSIM is an application development project within DOE’s Exascale Computing Project.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network project smartphone ap is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.

The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Get the app in the Google Play store.

Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015
Meet The Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.
After almost eight years at Stanford University (US), and a year at California Institute of Technology (US), the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California (US) Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).

There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.

Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.

USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.

If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.
Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.

Below, the QCN Quake Catcher Network map

QuakeAlertUSA

About Early Warning Labs, LLC

Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.

EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.

EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.

EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards
and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.

EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.

ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.

Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.

The primary project partners include:

United States Geological Survey
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES)
California Geological Survey California Institute of Technology
University of California Berkeley
University of Washington
University of Oregon
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Earthquake Threat

Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.

Part of the Solution

Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.

Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.

System Goal

The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.

Current Status

The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.

In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.

This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.

Authorities

The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.

For More Information

Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach
rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225

Learn more about EEW Research

ShakeAlert Fact Sheet

ShakeAlert Implementation Plan

Earthquake Early Warning Introduction

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.

ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.

ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Earthquake Early Warning Background

The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.

Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:
Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems

However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.

GNSS-Global Navigational Satellite System

GNSS station | Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array, Central Washington University (US)
_____________________________________________________________________________________

See the full article here .

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LBNL campus

Bringing Science Solutions to the World

In the world of science, The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering, and three of our scientists have been elected into the Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.

Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above the University of California- Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.

Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.

History

1931–1941

The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California-Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.

E.O. Lawrence’ first cyclotron.

LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.

LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.

Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded The DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and Robert Wilson founded The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

1942–1950

Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.

1951–2018

After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now The Department of Energy . The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now The DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.

Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.

The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.

The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy , with management from the University of California. Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.

Science mission

From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.

The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.

Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science:

The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.

The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Advanced Light Source.
The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.

Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center

A view of BELLA, the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator. Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt-Berkeley Lab.

The DOE Joint Genome Institute supports genomic research in support of the DOE missions in alternative energy, global carbon cycling, and environmental management. The JGI’s partner laboratories are Berkeley Lab, DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology . The JGI’s central role is the development of a diversity of large-scale experimental and computational capabilities to link sequence to biological insights relevant to energy and environmental research. Approximately 1,200 scientist-users take advantage of JGI’s capabilities for their research every year.

LBNL Molecular Foundry

The LBNL Molecular Foundry is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.

The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.

DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Cray Cori II supercomputer at National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, named after Gerty Cori, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science.

NERSC Hopper Cray XE6 supercomputer.

NERSC Cray XC30 Edison supercomputer.

NERSC GPFS for Life Sciences.

The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.

NERSC PDSF computer cluster in 2003.

PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.

Cray Shasta Perlmutter SC18 AMD Epyc Nvidia pre-exascale supercomputer.

NERSC is a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

The DOE’s Energy Science Network is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.

Berkeley Lab is the lead partner in the DOE’s Joint Bioenergy Institute (JBEI), located in Emeryville, California. Other partners are the DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory, the University of California (UC) campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science , and DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). JBEI’s primary scientific mission is to advance the development of the next generation of biofuels – liquid fuels derived from the solar energy stored in plant biomass. JBEI is one of three new U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs).

Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.

From temblor : “Faults underneath Seattle could trigger 33-foot tsunami wave”

From temblor

8.17.22
Laura Fattaruso | The University of Massachusettes-Amherst

A new report warns that Seattle waterfront and other low-lying areas could be inundated by a tsunami wave within minutes of a Seattle Fault earthquake.

Waterfront homes on Puget Sound’s Bainbridge Island sit at water level. Credit: Ryan Wu via Unsplash.

Just over a thousand years ago, a fault running east-west under Puget Sound ruptured, throwing parts of Bainbridge Island skyward as much as 23 feet (seven meters), and dropping West Point, Seattle, down three feet (one meter). These abrupt land surface changes were accompanied by an approximately magnitude-7.3 earthquake that triggered a tsunami wave, which left deposits throughout Puget Sound, as far as Everett, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Seattle.

New computer simulations reveal that the first wave probably hit within just three minutes of the earthquake. The research, released in a report by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) [below], highlights areas at risk for a future event.

“Right under your feet”

Researchers used records of the historic earthquake, found in the natural landscape, to re-create the land surface changes and resulting tsunami wave. Land south of the fault moved up, whereas land north of the rupture moved down. The resulting displacement of water in the Puget Sound produced a tsunami wave 33 feet (10 meters) high, moving as fast as 25 knots (13 meters/second). Though the first wave would hit Elliot Bay in downtown Seattle within about 3 minutes of the first ground shaking, inundation throughout different parts of Puget Sound continued for more than three hours. The oral history of the native Salish people in the region affirms the geologic observations of the catastrophic event.

Tsunami wave simulation for Seattle–Bainbridge Island, Wash.
Credit: Washington State Department of Natural Resources

Tsunami wave simulation for the Seattle and Bainbridge Island waterfronts, Washington, from a hypothetical large Seattle Fault earthquake scenario. Developed by Washington Geological Survey hazard geologists.

“Everyone thinks about the big one — the Cascadia megathrust rupture…

Cascadia subduction zone

…but there are local sources of hazard in the Puget Sound region that can cause cascading issues like landslides and tsunamis,” says Gabriel Lotto, a geophysicist at the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network who was not involved with the new research. “Those can be just as damaging locally as a really big one, because the source is right under your feet.”

The last strong earthquake in the region — the magnitude-6.8 Nisqually earthquake in 2001 — struck 31 miles (50 kilometers) underground, beneath the southern Puget Sound. That quake occurred on the Pacific tectonic plate, which is subducting beneath the North American plate. Although it produced significant shaking and damage in Seattle, the section of the fault that slipped in the quake was so deep that it did not trigger a tsunami. Earthquakes on shallow, surface-rupturing faults such as those running through Puget Sound, are a different story.

The Seattle Fault — the source of the shock modeled in the DNR report — is made up of a series of roughly parallel fault traces that run east-west through the metro’s southern suburbs and dissect Mercer and Bainbridge islands.

The Seattle Fault Zone (SFZ) — a group of parallel faults collectively known as the Seattle Fault — cuts through Puget Sound. The Olympia earthquake is also known as the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. Credit: Washington State Department of Natural Resources.

Long-lasting effects

An earthquake on the Seattle Fault would not just have a short-term impact, says Alexander Dolcimascolo, a tsunami geologist at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources and lead author of the report. “Once the floodwaters recede, there will be a new shoreline due to land level changes.” A new coast could see land that was one always dry and habitable, be flooded twice a day due to tides, he says.

“If you have waterfront property in that subsidence zone, there’s a chance that your home could be lost,” Dolcimascolo says. The Bainbridge Island Ferry Terminal, for example, dropped below the average high-water line during the earthquake modeled in the report.

The scenario, though alarming, has a low probability — less than a one percent chance — of happening in the next 50 years. What is more probable, though, is a somewhat smaller earthquake, between a magnitude 6.5 and 7.0, on any one of the shallow crustal faults in the Puget Sound. The study simulated the historic earthquake on the Seattle Fault, but the Tacoma Fault Zone to the south, and the South Whidbey Island fault zone in the north, could also trigger shaking and tsunami waves in the Puget Sound.

A white, sandy layer in a stream near Cultus Bay on Whidbey Island was deposited during the tsunami. Credit: Washington State Department of Natural Resources.

Current estimates give a 15% chance of a magnitude-6.5 event on one of these faults in the next 50 years, but as our knowledge about these faults improves, that probability could change. The exact hazard faced by any one region will depend on many factors — the magnitude of the earthquake, its timing relative to the tides and currents, the distance from the epicenter, the intensity of land surface changes. The scenario in this report is one of many possibilities. “Take it seriously, but not literally,” says Lotto.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning [below] system offers one way to mitigate some risks. The system can automatically respond to the first signs of shaking by shutting off certain water and gas lines, and delivers automated alerts to people in affected areas.

Bill Steele of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, who was not involved with the report, says he hopes this study will motivate wider use of the ShakeAlert system. “This study is a reminder that we can always be doing more to prepare for hazards,” he says. “Looking at scenarios like this reminds us that we don’t have time, when there’s only a few minutes before a wave arrives on the coast, to be getting humans to make the right decisions and push the right buttons. It’s just not enough time.”

Science report:
Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR)

References:

Dolcimascolo, Alexander; Eungard, D. W.; Allen, Corina; LeVeque, R. J.; Adams, L. M.; Arcas, Diego; Titov, V. V.; González, F. I.; Moore, Christopher, 2022, Tsunami inundation, current speeds, and arrival times simulated from a large Seattle Fault earthquake scenario for Puget Sound and other parts of the Salish Sea: Washington Geological Survey Map Series 2022-03, 16 sheets, scale 1:48,000, 51 p. text.

See the full article here .

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_____________________________________________________________________________________

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network projectEarthquake Network is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.

The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Get the app in the Google Play store.

Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015

Meet The Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.

After almost eight years at Stanford, and a year at CalTech, the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).

There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.

Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.

USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.

If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.

Below, the QCN Quake Catcher Network map

ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.

Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.

The primary project partners include:

United States Geological Survey
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES)
California Geological Survey
California Institute of Technology
University of California Berkeley
University of Washington
University of Oregon
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Earthquake Threat

Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.

Part of the Solution

Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.

Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.

System Goal

The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.

Current Status

The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.

In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.

This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.

Authorities

The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.

For More Information

Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach
rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225

Learn more about EEW Research

ShakeAlert Fact Sheet

ShakeAlert Implementation Plan

QuakeAlertUSA

About Early Warning Labs, LLC

Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.

EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.

EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.

EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.

EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.

Earthquake Early Warning Introduction

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.

ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.

ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Earthquake Early Warning Background

The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.

Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:

Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems

However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.

From “Eos” : “Global Seismic Networks:: Recording the Heartbeat of the Earth”

From “Eos”

AT

AGU

9.9.22
Adam T. Ringler
aringler@usgs.gov

Global broadband seismographic networks have provided the science community with 30 years of data which is being used to understand the Earth.

The underground vault and nearby weather station at Global Seismographic Network station TRIS on Tristan da Cunha, in the South Atlantic. Credit: IRIS

For the past 30 years, Earth scientists have been monitoring the entire planet from surface processes down to the innermost core using near real-time digital seismic data. These data are collected by global seismographic networks and are free and openly available to anyone. These networks operate seismic stations that are often in very remote locations such as Pitcairn Island in the middle of the south Pacific Ocean or the South Pole in Antarctica.

A recent article published in Reviews of Geophysics [below] explores the history and resulting scientific achievements of Global Seismographic Networks. We asked the lead author to give an overview of how Global Seismographic Networks evolved, what they’ve uncovered, and what challenges remain.

What are “Global Seismographic Networks” and how are they used?

Global seismographic networks are collections of seismic stations that measure near real-time ground motion (movement of the earth from earthquake shaking or other sources) and send those data to scientists. The instruments at these stations are so sensitive that they can record earthquakes from all over the world. This information is then used to locate the earthquake, determine its size, and resolve how the fault that generated the earthquake moved.

a) Global Seismographic Network as of 2021 with stations colored by primary sensor type. (b) Nanometrics T-360 GSN sensor (red); (c) Nanometrics T-120 borehole sensor (purple); (d) Streckeisen STS-6 sensor (orange); (e) Streckeisen STS-1sensor (blue); (f) GeoTech KS-54000 sensor (green). These instruments range from a height of approximately 16 centimeters (e) to 2 meters (f) and are not shown to scale. Credit: Ringler et al. [2022], Figure 7.

These data are also used to study the interior of the Earth. By using earthquakes as sources of seismic energy, scientists estimate the internal properties of the Earth via tomography, which is similar to how a computed tomography (CT) scan works using seismic waves instead of X-rays.

In the absence of ground motions generated by earthquakes, some of the next largest signals that these instruments detect are smaller seismic waves generated through the interaction of ocean waves with Earth’s crust. Therefore, the long-running history of global seismographic network stations can also be used to track changes in global ocean wave activity, which can be important for climate science.

What did the first seismic network look like and how has it evolved?

The first global seismographic networks were relatively small (20 to 30 stations) and recorded data on paper records. In the 1960s, these networks evolved to be much larger (100 to 150 stations), such as the Worldwide Standardized Seismographic Network (WWSSN) to monitor for nuclear testing.

Although the WWSSN was state of the art at the time, it was later realized that the network was unable to record the slowest oscillations of great earthquakes, also known as normal modes. Large earthquakes cause normal modes to oscillate through the Earth much like ringing a bell. The Earth rings for many days, and each oscillation takes several minutes to complete. These normal modes provide unique information about the properties of Earth’s core and lower mantle that seismic waves from smaller earthquakes can’t tell us.

Advances in technology and a continued interest to study normal modes by scientists led to the development of the GEOSCOPE network and the Global Seismographic Network (GSN) starting in the 1980s, with continual improvements to today. These state-of-the-art networks digitally record an exceptional range of ground motion amplitudes, from movements as small as the size of an atom to accelerations capable of collapsing buildings.

Current instrumentation used in the Global Seismographic Network (GSN). Credit: Ringler et al. [2022], Figure 8.

How have GSNs advanced our understanding of the Earth?

Global seismographic networks have provided a wealth of information about earthquakes, properties of the Earth’s interior, and surface processes such as ocean storms, large volcanic eruptions, and glacial calving events.

Through locating and determining slip mechanisms of earthquakes, the long-running history of these networks has also helped quantify plate tectonics through the characterization of earthquakes along tectonic plate boundaries.

Global seismographic networks have contributed to several foundational observations of Earth’s interior, including providing the first unambiguous evidence that the inner core is solid.

Although not an original goal of these networks, they have recently been used to provide insight into environmental changes in the oceans and polar regions, as well as unique observations about how large volcanic eruptions oscillate the Earth’s atmosphere.

In addition, these networks have helped scientists and engineers understand regions of potential hazard and develop building codes that mitigate loss of life and property after large earthquakes.

How can scientists continue to advance the quality of seismic data and networks?

Continued long-term and freely accessible monitoring data provided by global seismographic networks and support from the international scientific community to ensure high-quality data would be beneficial to advancement. Many scientific discoveries made using global seismic data were only possible after decades of data collection. For example, monitoring the rotation of the inner core, which is responsible for Earth’s magnetic field, required long running high-quality data records from globally distributed stations.

Are there any additional interdisciplinary uses for GSNs?

The very broadband nature and multidisciplinary development of global seismic networks makes them very well-suited to be used for interdisciplinary studies. Earth scientists have been able to use global seismic network data to study changes in climate and oceans. Many global seismic stations not only record seismic data, but also atmospheric data (such as pressure) and the Earth’s magnetic field. These additional data streams can be used to study things like how large volcanoes, such as the volcanic eruption near Tonga on 15 January 2022, erupted and how the energy seismically coupled into the Earth.

What are some remaining challenges where additional research, data or modeling efforts are needed?

Global seismographic networks have been widely successful at imaging the interior of the Earth, quantifying where tectonic plate boundaries are, and reducing geological hazards. Similar to how new and improved telescopes produce higher resolution images of distant galaxies, continued improvements to the infrastructure and instrumentation of global seismic networks will lead to new discoveries and an improved understanding of the Earth’s structure, atmospheric interactions, and geologic hazards.

Many questions about the Earth still remain for which seismic data may help provide answers. For example, seismic data could provide one of the key tools for better understanding the evolution of the interior of the Earth and how it interacts with Earth surface processes. The long-running data streams from global seismographic networks could also help us understand increasing extreme climate activity that interacts with the Earth’s surface. Additionally, global station coverage is sparse in some regions, including in ocean basins and in central Africa, which limits our ability to detect earthquakes and thus obtain clear images on Earth structure in these regions.

Science paper:
Reviews of Geophysics

See the full article here .

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“Eos” is the leading source for trustworthy news and perspectives about the Earth and space sciences and their impact. Its namesake is Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, who represents the light shed on understanding our planet and its environment in space by the Earth and space sciences.

From “Eos” : “Months of Gravity Changes Preceded the Tōhoku Earthquake”

From “Eos”

AT

AGU

9.1.22
Sarah Derouin

Using GRACE satellite data researchers discovered anomalous gravimetric signals that occurred before a seismic event that started deep within Earth.

An aerial view of Wakuya, Japan, after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake shows how devastating subducting earthquakes can be. Continuous gravity monitoring of the Pacific subduction belt might highlight where big earthquakes may occur. Credit: Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Alexander Tidd/U.S. Navy CC BY-NC 2.0.

Earthquakes caused by subducting tectonic plates can be highly destructive events. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake caused immense damage to population centers in eastern Japan.

Constant monitoring of faulted regions with seismographs and space geodesy measurements can indicate when land deformations are occurring in shallow or surficial systems, giving researchers a hand with hazard mitigation work. But for subduction zones, much of the deformation occurs deep within Earth, making it difficult to detect on the surface.

In a new paper, Panet et al.[Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth (below)] investigate whether they could detect pulling slab deformations using gravity measurements from satellites. The team used Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite data—GRACE is a twin satellite system launched by NASA and DLR (German Aerospace Center) that makes detailed measurements of Earth’s gravity field.

NASA Grace

National Aeronautics Space Agency/GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences [Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Geowissenschaften] (DE) Grace-FO satellites launched in May 2018.

These measurements can reveal information about changes in Earth systems, including amounts and locations of water and ice as well as crustal deformations.

In previous studies, the team identified and mapped anomalous variations in Earth’s gravity in the months preceding the Tōhoku earthquake in both space and time. In this paper, the researchers developed a new way to detect signals along plate boundaries.

The researchers used GRACE to study subtle changes in gravity in subduction systems. Using overlapping passes of GRACE gravity gradients from 2004 to 2011, the team tested whether they could see deep signals in the solid Earth before Tōhoku occurred, and created a method to identify solid mass redistributions based on the variation of gravity gradients.

They found there were unique gravity signatures preceding the Tōhoku earthquake, likely associated with deep deformations in the subduction system. The team says their work presents a way to continuously monitor Pacific plate subduction movements at depth using real-time gravity-measuring satellites.

Science paper:
Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth

See the full article here .

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“Eos” is the leading source for trustworthy news and perspectives about the Earth and space sciences and their impact. Its namesake is Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, who represents the light shed on understanding our planet and its environment in space by the Earth and space sciences.

From The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: “Geological carbon sequestration in mantle rocks prevents large earthquakes in parts of the San Andreas Fault”

From The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

8.17.22
Authors: Frieder Klein1*, David L. Goldsby2, Jian Lin1, Muriel Andreani3

Affiliations:

1 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA

2 University of Pennsylvania, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Philadelphia, PA, USA

3 Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon, UMR 5276, ENS et Université Lyon 1, 69622 Villeurbanne Cedex, France

*corresponding author

Outcrop of carbonate-altered mantle rock in the San Andreas Fault area. A recent study shows that carbon sequestration in mantle rocks may prevent large earthquakes in parts of the San Andreas Fault. Image credit: Frieder Klein/©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Smaller and more frequent quakes help to reduce tectonic strain.

The San Andreas Fault in California is renowned for its large and infrequent earthquakes.

San Andreas Fault

However, some segments of the San Andreas Fault instead are characterized by frequent quakes of small to moderate magnitude and high rates of continuous or episodic aseismic creep. With tectonic strain released in a quasi-steady motion that reduces the potential for large earthquakes along those segments.

Now, researchers say ubiquitous evidence for ongoing geological carbon sequestration in mantle rocks in the creeping sections of the SAF is one underlying cause of aseismic creep along a roughly 150 kilometer-long SAF segment between San Juan Bautista and Parkfield, California, and along several other fault segments.

“Although there is no consensus regarding the underlying cause of aseismic creep, aqueous fluids and mechanically weak minerals appear to play a central role,” researchers say in a new paper, “Carbonation of serpentinite in creeping faults of California,” published in Geophysical Research Letters [below].

The new study integrates field observations and thermodynamic modeling “to examine possible relationships between the occurrence of serpentinite, silica-carbonate rock, and CO2-rich aqueous fluids in creeping faults of California,” the paper states. “Our models predict that carbonation of serpentinite leads to the formation of talc and magnesite, followed by silica-carbonate rock. While abundant exposures of silica-carbonate rock indicate complete carbonation, serpentinite hosted CO2-rich spring fluids are strongly supersaturated with talc at elevated temperatures. Hence, carbonation of serpentinite is likely ongoing in parts of the San Andres Fault system and operates in conjunction with other modes of talc formation that may further enhance the potential for aseismic creep, thereby limiting the potential for large earthquakes.”

The paper indicates that because wet talc is a mechanically weak mineral, “its formation through carbonation promotes tectonic movements without large earthquakes.”

The researchers recognized several possible underlying mechanisms causing aseismic creep in the SAF, and they also noted that because the rates of aseismic creep are significantly higher in some parts of the SAF system, an additional or different mechanism – the carbonation of serpentinite – is needed to account for the full extent of the creep.

With fluids basically everywhere along the SAF, but with only certain portions of the fault being lubricated, researchers considered that a rock could be responsible for the lubrication. Some earlier studies had suggested that the lubricant could be talc, a soft and slippery component that is commonly used in baby powder. A well-established mechanism for forming talc is by adding silica to mantle rocks. However, the researchers here focused on another talc-forming mechanism: adding CO2 to mantle rocks to form soapstone.

“The addition of CO2 to mantle rocks – which is the mineral carbonation or carbon sequestration process – had not previously been investigated in the context of earthquake formation or the natural prevention of earthquakes. Using basic geological constraints, our study showed where these carbonate-altered mantle rocks are and where there are springs along the fault line in California that are enriched in CO2. It turned out that when you plot the occurrence and distribution of these rock types and the occurrence of CO2-rich springs in California, they all line up along the San Andreas Fault in creeping sections of the fault where you don’t have major earthquakes,” said Frieder Klein, lead author of the journal article.

Klein, an associate scientist in the Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, explained that carbonation is basically the uptake of CO2 by a rock. Klein noted that he had used existing U.S. Geological Survey databases and Google Earth to plot the locations of carbonate-altered rocks and CO2-rich springs.

“The geological evidence suggests that this mineral carbonation process is taking place and that talc is an intermediary reaction product of that process,” Klein said. Although researchers did not find soapstone on mantle rock outcrops, results from theoretical models “strongly suggest that carbonation is an ongoing process and that soapstone indeed could form in the SAF at depth,” the paper notes.

These theoretical models “suggest that carbon sequestration with the SAF is taking place today and that the process is actively helping to lubricate the fault and minimize strong earthquakes in the creeping portions of the SAF,” Klein said.

The paper also notes that this mechanism may also be present in other fault systems. “Because CO2-rich aqueous fluids and ultramafic rocks are particularly common in young orogenic belts and subduction zones, the formation of talc via mineral carbonation may play a critical role in controlling the seismic behavior of major tectonic faults around the world.”

“Our study allows us to better understand the fundamental processes that are taking place within fault zones where these ingredients are present, and allows us to better understand the seismic behavior of these faults, some of which are in densely populated areas and some of which are in lightly populated or oceanic settings,” Klein said.

This work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.

Science paper:
Geophysical Research Letters

See the full article here .

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Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Mission Statement

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is dedicated to advancing knowledge of the ocean and its connection with the Earth system through a sustained commitment to excellence in science, engineering, and education, and to the application of this knowledge to problems facing society.

Vision & Mission

The ocean is a defining feature of our planet and crucial to life on Earth, yet it remains one of the planet’s last unexplored frontiers. For this reason, WHOI scientists and engineers are committed to understanding all facets of the ocean as well as its complex connections with Earth’s atmosphere, land, ice, seafloor, and life—including humanity. This is essential not only to advance knowledge about our planet, but also to ensure society’s long-term welfare and to help guide human stewardship of the environment. WHOI researchers are also dedicated to training future generations of ocean science leaders, to providing unbiased information that informs public policy and decision-making, and to expanding public awareness about the importance of the global ocean and its resources.

The Institution is organized into six departments, the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Ocean Research, and a marine policy center. Its shore-based facilities are located in the village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts and a mile and a half away on the Quissett Campus. The bulk of the Institution’s funding comes from grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation and other government agencies, augmented by foundations and private donations.

WHOI scientists, engineers, and students collaborate to develop theories, test ideas, build seagoing instruments, and collect data in diverse marine environments. Ships operated by WHOI carry research scientists throughout the world’s oceans. The WHOI fleet includes two large research vessels (R/V Atlantis and R/V Neil Armstrong); the coastal craft Tioga; small research craft such as the dive-operation work boat Echo; the deep-diving human-occupied submersible Alvin; the tethered, remotely operated vehicle Jason/Medea; and autonomous underwater vehicles such as the REMUS and SeaBED.
WHOI offers graduate and post-doctoral studies in marine science. There are several fellowship and training programs, and graduate degrees are awarded through a joint program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. WHOI is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges . WHOI also offers public outreach programs and informal education through its Exhibit Center and summer tours. The Institution has a volunteer program and a membership program, WHOI Associate.

On October 1, 2020, Peter B. de Menocal became the institution’s eleventh president and director.

History

In 1927, a National Academy of Sciences committee concluded that it was time to “consider the share of the United States of America in a worldwide program of oceanographic research.” The committee’s recommendation for establishing a permanent independent research laboratory on the East Coast to “prosecute oceanography in all its branches” led to the founding in 1930 of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

A $2.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation supported the summer work of a dozen scientists, construction of a laboratory building and commissioning of a research vessel, the 142-foot (43 m) ketch R/V Atlantis, whose profile still forms the Institution’s logo.

WHOI grew substantially to support significant defense-related research during World War II, and later began a steady growth in staff, research fleet, and scientific stature. From 1950 to 1956, the director was Dr. Edward “Iceberg” Smith, an Arctic explorer, oceanographer and retired Coast Guard rear admiral.

In 1977 the institution appointed the influential oceanographer John Steele as director, and he served until his retirement in 1989.

On 1 September 1985, a joint French-American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution identified the location of the wreck of the RMS Titanic which sank off the coast of Newfoundland 15 April 1912.

On 3 April 2011, within a week of resuming of the search operation for Air France Flight 447, a team led by WHOI, operating full ocean depth autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) owned by the Waitt Institute discovered, by means of sidescan sonar, a large portion of debris field from flight AF447.

In March 2017 the institution effected an open-access policy to make its research publicly accessible online.

The Institution has maintained a long and controversial business collaboration with the treasure hunter company Odyssey Marine. Likewise, WHOI has participated in the location of the San José galleon in Colombia for the commercial exploitation of the shipwreck by the Government of President Santos and a private company.

In 2019, iDefense reported that China’s hackers had launched cyberattacks on dozens of academic institutions in an attempt to gain information on technology being developed for the United States Navy. Some of the targets included the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The attacks have been underway since at least April 2017.