From temblor : “Can smartphones affixed to buildings detect earthquakes?”

From temblor

September 1, 2021
By Meghomita Das, Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, McGill University (CA).

Damaging earthquakes can strike at any time, leaving behind a trail of devastation. Recovery from such events can take several years. Unfortunately, scientists cannot forecast the exact time an earthquake will strike. But extensive research in the field of earthquake early warning systems is ongoing. Such systems can provide seconds of warning, which could save lives and prevent people from overwhelming emergency management systems.

The 2009 Cinchona earthquake, that struck close to the capital city of San Jose, caused 34 fatalities and collapsed houses across Costa Rica. Credit: Capt Diana Parzik, US Army, via Wikipedia, CC-Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Earthquake early warning systems work by having a densely distributed network of seismic stations capable of rapidly detecting an earthquake, and by sending alerts that warn of shaking to the population. A significant hurdle to designing and implementing such systems is the high cost of installing multiple, scientific-grade seismic stations across earthquake-prone regions. For countries like India or Mexico, which have limited resources and high population densities, these expensive networks are not feasible.

In a recent study published in AGU Advances, a team of scientists explored whether a low-cost, robust and operational earthquake early warning system — built around comparatively cheap smartphones instead of seismic stations — might become a reality in the near future in Costa Rica, a country that regularly experiences high-magnitude earthquakes. During a six-month testing period, this network, called Alerta Sismica Temprana Utilizando Telefonos Inteligentes (ASTUTI), a collaborative effort between The Geological Survey (US) and the National University of Costa Rica [Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica] (CR), detected and sent alerts for five earthquakes that produced significant shaking in San Jose, Costa Rica’s densely populated capital city.

Smartphones and earthquakes

Smartphones come packaged with GPS location services-constant communication via cell networks-and a device called an accelerometer that helps your phone’s screen rotate as you move it around. The accelerometer can also record any shaking your phone may experience. “Essentially, your phone costs maybe $100 and has all the three components that are there in a scientific grade seismic station, which costs thousands of dollars,” says Marino Protti, a study co-author and a seismologist at the Observatorio Vulcanologico y Sismologico de Costa Rica (Universidad Nacional).

To set up the ASTUTI network, the team deployed 82 Android smartphones, encased in protective boxes, throughout Costa Rica, at an annual cost of $20,000 USD. They installed these smartphones inside buildings, on either the walls or floors of the ground story. The phones are plugged in to AC power supplies.

The accelerometers stream data via cellular networks in real time to the cloud, says Protti. A cloud-based server receives signals from all stations. So, when an earthquake strikes and four sites detect strong ground motion, an alert goes out to people in San Jose, providing between 10 and 30 seconds of warning before the earthquake’s waves arrive, he explains.

San Jose’s location relative to the Middle America Trench — where the Cocos Plate dives beneath the Caribbean Plate — is perfect to test the efficacy of this network because the city is in the Goldilocks position. It’s far enough from the trench such that issuing a timely alert is feasible, but close enough such that the population will feel shaking. The ASTUTI network also issued alerts as soon as events were detected, rather than either waiting for an earthquake to grow larger or trying to define its characteristics. This choice gave people more time to protect themselves.

Did ASTUTI feel it?

During its six months of operation, a group of people selected to receive alerts via phone were notified of five events that ASTUTI detected, with magnitudes ranging between 4.8 and 5.3. Thirteen earthquakes struck Costa Rica in that time, but the other eight earthquakes did not produce significant shaking to warrant an alert. For two of the five detected events, ASTUTI sent out alerts at the earliest possible time — when the first wave from the earthquake, also called the P-wave — was detected by smartphones. This provided people with enough time to take protective action. Moreover, each of the five detected events were accompanied by a “Did You Feel It” report by the U.S. Geological Survey. This citizen science project collects “felt reports” from people who felt shaking (or didn’t) during earthquakes worldwide. In other words, the earthquakes that shook people enough to file a report were detected by the ASTUTI network.

One of the ASTUTI earthquake early warning stations. Image on the left shows the encased smartphone, and image on the right shows the software interface that records data from the station. Credit: Brooks et al., 2021, CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0.

With recent advancements in earthquake early warning, there is a potential for developing a network consisting of expensive high-end devices complemented by a larger number of low-cost devices capable of detecting ground motion, says Raj Prasanna, a telecommunications and electronics engineer and senior lecturer at Massey University-New Zealand [Te Kunenga Ki Pūrehuroa](NZ) who was not involved with this study. “Together, they can become an affordable warning network, with acceptable levels of reliability,” he says.

In the next phase of development, the team plans to create a hybrid system by integrating this smartphone-enabled network with Costa Rica’s existing scientific-grade seismic network, which will improve the accuracy and reduce time of detection of the earthquake early warning system.

What the public wants

Setting up an earthquake early warning system that effectively prompts the public to get to safety is challenging, says Sarah Minson of the USGS, a co-author of the new study. “How do we find out what people want; how do we find out if they are enjoying the system?” she asks. Because earthquake early warning systems are relatively new and people haven’t interacted with them, Minson says, they may not have a personal feel for what works for them. Plus, every country’s needs are different. People’s responses to the same alerts vary depending upon how that specific society culturally reacts to natural hazards.

To that end, the team plans to develop a smartphone-based application. In the future, they will work with the National Commission for Risk Prevention and Emergency Management in Costa Rica to measure how the Costa Rican population perceives earthquake early warning. The goal, says Protti, is to create a more coordinated response plan for earthquakes in Costa Rica. By coupling effective messaging with earthquake early warning, the public will have crucial seconds to take actions that can protect their lives.

References

Brooks, B. A., Protti, M., Ericksen, T., Bunn, J., Vega, F., Cochran, E. S., … & Glennie, C. L. (2021). Robust earthquake early warning at a fraction of the cost: ASTUTI Costa Rica. AGU Advances, 2(3), e2021AV000407.

See the full article here .

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Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network project Earthquake 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 Simon Fraser University (CA) : “Ground-breaking work from SFU identifies new source for earthquakes and tsunamis in the Greater Tokyo Region”

From Simon Fraser University (CA)

September 02, 2021
Diane Mar-Nicolle

Jessica Pilarczyk and colleagues from the Geological Survey of Japan core rice paddies on the Boso peninsula to uncover geological evidence for a tsunami from 1,000 years ago. Credit: SFU.

Researchers have discovered geologic evidence that unusually large earthquakes and tsunamis from the Tokyo region—located near tectonic plate boundaries that are recognized as a seismic hazard source—may be traceable to a previously unconsidered plate boundary. The team, headed by Simon Fraser University Earth scientist Jessica Pilarczyk, has published its research today in Nature Geoscience.

The team’s ground-breaking discovery represents a new and unconsidered seismic risk for Japan with implications for countries lining the Pacific Rim, including Canada.

Pilarczyk points to low-lying areas like Delta, Richmond and Port Alberni as potentially vulnerable to tsunamis originating from this region.

In 2011 eastern Japan was hit with a massive magnitude 9 quake – creating the largest rupture area of any earthquake originating from the Japan Trench. It triggered the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and a tsunami that travelled thousands of miles away—impacting the shores of British Columbia, California, Oregon, Hawaii and Chile.

For the past decade, Pilarczyk and an international team of collaborators have been working with The Geological Survey of Japan, AIST｜産総研 地質調査総合センタ](JP) to study Japan’s unique geologic history. Together, they uncovered and analyzed sandy deposits from the Boso Peninsula region (50 km east of Tokyo) that they attribute to an unusually large tsunami that occurred about 1,000 years ago.

Until now, scientists did not have historical records to ascertain if a portion of the Philippine Sea/Pacific plate boundary near the Boso Peninsula was capable of generating large tsunamis similar in size as the Tohoku event in 2011.

Using a combination of radiocarbon dating, geologic and historical records, and paleoecology, the team used 13 hypothetical and historical models to assess each of the three plate boundaries, including the Continental/Philippine Sea plate boundary (Sagami Trough), the Continental/Pacific plate boundary (Japan Trench) and the Philippine Sea/Pacific plate boundary (Izu-Bonin Trench) as sources of the 1,000-year-old earthquake.

Jessica Pilarczyk (SFU) and collaborator Tina Dura (The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (US)) sample sediment cores from rice paddies of the Greater Tokyo Region that contain evidence for an earthquake from 1,000 years ago that potentially originated from a historically unconsidered earthquake source. Credit: SFU.

Pilarczyk reports that the modeled scenarios suggest that the source of the tsunami from 1,000 years ago originated from the offshore area off the Boso Peninsula — the smallest of which (for example, possible earthquakes with the lowest minimum magnitude), are linked to the previously unconsidered Izu-Bonin Trench at the boundary of the Philippine Sea and Pacific plates.

“Earthquake hazard assessments for the Tokyo region are complicated by the’ trench-trench triple junction’, where the oceanic Philippine Sea Plate not only underthrusts a continental plate but is also being subducted by the Pacific Plate.”says Pilarczyk, an assistant professor of Earth sciences at SFU who holds a Canada Research Chair in Natural Hazards. ”Great thrust earthquakes and associated tsunamis are historically recognized hazards from the Continental/Philippine Sea (Sagami Trough) and Continental/Pacific (Japan Trench) plate boundaries but not from the Philippine Sea/Pacific boundary alone.”

Pilarczyk hopes that these findings will be used to produce better informed seismic hazard maps for Japan. She also says that this information could be used by far-field locations, including Canada, to inform building practices and emergency management strategies that would help mitigate the destructive consequences of an earthquake similar to the one of 1,000 years ago.

See the full article here.

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Simon Fraser University (CA) is a public research university in British Columbia, Canada, with three campuses: Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, and Vancouver. The 170-hectare (420-acre) main Burnaby campus on Burnaby Mountain, located 20 kilometres (12 mi) from downtown Vancouver, was established in 1965 and comprises more than 30,000 students and 160,000 alumni. The university was created in an effort to expand higher education across Canada.

Simon Fraser University (CA) is a member of multiple national and international higher education, including the Association of Commonwealth Universities, International Association of Universities, and Universities Canada (CA). Simon Fraser University has also partnered with other universities and agencies to operate joint research facilities such as the TRIUMF- Canada’s particle accelerator centre [Centre canadien d’accélération des particules] (CA) for particle and nuclear physics, which houses the world’s largest cyclotron, and Bamfield Marine Station, a major centre for teaching and research in marine biology.

Undergraduate and graduate programs at Simon Fraser University (CA) operate on a year-round, three-semester schedule. Consistently ranked as Canada’s top comprehensive university and named to the Times Higher Education list of 100 world universities under 50, Simon Fraser University (CA)is also the first Canadian member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the world’s largest college sports association. In 2015, Simon Fraser University (CA) became the second Canadian university to receive accreditation from the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. Simon Fraser University (CA) faculty and alumni have won 43 fellowships to the Royal Society of Canada [Société royale du Canada](CA), three Rhodes Scholarships and one Pulitzer Prize. Among the list of alumni includes two former premiers of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell and Ujjal Dosanjh, owner of the Vancouver Canucks NHL team, Francesco Aquilini, Prime Minister of Lesotho, Pakalitha Mosisili, director at the Max Planck Society [Max Planck Gesellschaft](DE) , Robert Turner, and humanitarian and cancer research activist, Terry Fox.

From Live Science (US): “Earthquake swarm rocks the ground at Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano”

From Live Science (US)

8.27.21
Harry Baker

A lava lake inside the Pu’u ‘Ō’ō crater in Kilauea’s’ eastern rift zone during a previous eruption. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Kilauea volcano gave scientists and local Hawaiians a scare this week, when a swarm of more than 140 earthquakes in just 12 hours prompted authorities to raise the alarm over a possible imminent eruption.

But now, Kilauea’s brief rumble is over; the volcano did not erupt and is barely registering any earthquakes.

The Geological Survey (US) made this report on Thursday (Aug. 26).

However, Kilauea’s flare of activity set scientists on edge. The earthquake swarm occurred between 4:30 p.m. local time (10:30 p.m. EDT) Monday (Aug. 23) and 4:30 a.m. local time (10:30 a.m. EDT) Tuesday (Aug. 24) beneath the south part of Kilauea’s summit caldera, with a peak in activity around 1:30 a.m. local time (7:30 a.m. EDT) Wednesday.

This is according to the USGS.

The earthquakes were tiny; most registered at below magnitude 1.0, with the most violent reaching magnitude 3.3. The tectonic activity also coincided with a shift in the ground formation to the west of the swarm, which the USGS said “may indicate an intrusion of magma occurring about 0.6 to 1.2 miles (1 to 2 kilometers) beneath the south caldera.”

See the full article here .

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From Cornell Chronicle (US) : “Geophysicist sprints to monitor quake aftershocks in Alaska”

From Cornell Chronicle (US)

August 27, 2021
David Nutt
cunews@cornell.edu

Geoffrey Abers, the William and Katherine Snee Professor in Geological Sciences, deploys a temporary seismometer on Kodiak Island in August. Provided.

When an 8.2-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Chignik Alaska on July 29 2021 geophysicist Geoffrey Abers did the logical – if not simple – thing.

He raced to Alaska with a group of collaborators to record its aftershocks.

The data they collect could provide new insight into the mechanics of crustal faults and possibly help researchers understand and anticipate future earthquake clusters.

“This was the biggest earthquake in the U.S. since 1965,” said Abers, the William and Katherine Snee Professor in Geological Sciences and chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the College of Engineering. “There are very few good recordings of earthquakes this large anywhere on the planet. So that’s a big motivation for trying to understand the sequence as sort of an archetype. We know enough about the area and its past history that we can put it in context.”

Because Alaska rests atop a subduction zone, where it is regularly jarred by shifting tectonic plates, the country is a wellspring of seismic activity, and Abers has been studying its earthquakes for three decades.

In 2017, he led the Alaska Amphibious Community Seismic Experiment (AACSE), a $4.5 million project that deployed 105 high-end seismometers along a 435-mile-long stretch of the Alaska peninsula’s coast.

The July 29 quake had a whiff of déjà vu. It occurred in almost the exact same spot as the AACSE research.

“I thought if anybody’s going to figure this out, it’s us, because we know the logistics of it,” he said.

Unfortunately, the AACSE seismometers had been collected in 2019 to harvest the data, which meant Abers and his collaborators needed to acquire new instrumentation more or less from scratch. On the plus side, they knew precisely where to put it all. They just needed to get there quickly.

“You’re racing against time because every day there are fewer aftershocks on average. That happens less and less the longer you wait,” he said.

Abers reconnected with his main AACSE collaborator, Jeff Freymueller, a geodesy specialist at The Michigan State University (US), and researchers with The University of Alaska-Fairbanks (US), The University of California- Santa Cruz (US) and The University of Colorado-Boulder (US). The team received a $154,000 rapid grant from The National Science Foundation (US), which had funded the AACSE. For their equipment, they turned to the IRIS Program for the Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere (PASSCAL) instrument center, an NSF-supported user facility at The New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (US).

“This all happened really fast. It’s kind of a blur,” Abers said. “Almost literally at the 11th hour, we were still assembling the team of people.”

The researchers began arriving in Alaska on Aug. 8. Abers spent several days deploying five temporary seismometers on Kodiak Island. Each seismometer consists of a sensor, roughly the size of a large coffee mug, that is buried about two feet underground and connected by cable to a data logger, which converts electrical signals to digital bits and stores them on a disk. The units are powered by air-alkaline technology that keeps the seismographs running all year. The electronics and batteries are housed in sturdy aluminum boxes, specially designed to resist the prying paws of the numerous brown bears on the island.

Freymueller’s group traveled further out on the Alaska Peninsula to install continuous GPS sites that will record post-seismic movements with precise timing, as well as additional seismometers.

The team also revived their old AACSE blog to document their efforts.

By Aug. 18, the researchers were returning home. They won’t be able to analyze their data until they travel to Alaska in late spring to collect the instruments. Their data will be sent to the IRIS Data Management Center, where it will be publicly accessible for anyone interested.

“The Alaska peninsula section has been especially interesting,” Abers said. “These plates are steadily converging. The stresses are building up. This is the place it’s been the longest since the last big earthquake (circa 1938), so seems like the most likely for the next one.”

Abers once thought of earthquake prediction as a “fool’s errand,” but he’s become more optimistic that by understanding how stresses can spread to other segments, seismologists may be able to develop a mechanism for specific causal prediction.

While the team must wait until next year to reap the full rewards of their research, they did experience seismic activity in real time. At least some of them did.

“There was a 6.9 aftershock while we were up there,” Abers said. “But it was the middle of the night, so I slept through it.”

See the full article here .

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Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University (US) is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute(US) in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through the SUNY – The State University of New York (US) system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University(US) laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States. Cornell is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation(US), accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech(US) engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US)’s JPL-Caltech (US) and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico(US) until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association (US) and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico](US).

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As an National Science Foundation (US) center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.

In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory(US), which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.

As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.

From temblor : “Submarine mountains can subdue earthquakes”

From temblor

August 23, 2021

Scientists surveying the seabed off New Zealand’s east coast have uncovered undersea mountains that help explain mysterious slow-motion earthquakes.

By Erin Martin-Jones, Ph.D., Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge (UK)

Earth’s tectonic plates are constantly jostling for space — colliding and diving under one another in a dance that sculpts dramatic mountain chains, fuels volcanic eruptions and delivers earth-shattering tremors. But sometimes these forces can have more subtle impacts. Take, for instance, silent earthquakes or “slow-slip events,” which can move at slow-motion speeds, stretching their ruptures over weeks to months. Often, no one feels a thing, and these events go undetected even by seismometers.

So why do some faults slip suddenly and set off deadly earthquakes while others slide slowly and stealthily? A new study [Nature] suggests that off the coast of New Zealand, where thousands of small quakes occur each year, excess water locked within undersea mountains, or “seamounts,” can promote the silent sliding linked to slow-motion earthquakes.

Map of Hikurangi Subduction Zone, showing locations where electromagnetic receivers were deployed to collect data. Credit: Christine Chesley, using GeoMapApp and data from William Ryan et al., Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (2009).

The Hikurangi Margin Subduction Zone

To understand slow-slip earthquakes off New Zealand’s eastern coast, a team of researchers led by Christine Chesley of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory first had to figure out a way to peer into the depths of a subduction zone.

The team used electromagnetic methods to essentially take an MRI scan of the seabed along the Hikurangi Margin where the Pacific Plate dives beneath the Australian Plate. That subduction motion along the margin is partly responsible for the more than 15,000 earthquakes in the region each year. Most are so small that they go unnoticed, but between 150 and 200 are large enough to be felt.

The research vessel hauls in one of the receivers used to take electromagnetic measurements of the seabed. Credit: Kerry Key.

This subduction zone poses a significant earthquake and tsunami hazard to coastal communities in New Zealand, but the largest earthquakes only seem to occur toward the south of the margin — and scientists want to know why. “One of the fascinating things about this area, and why so many have studied it, is the puzzling variation in earthquake hazards over a very small area,” Chesley says.

Although large earthquakes haven’t struck the North Island in roughly the last 200 years, evidence of ancient quakes is written in the rocks along the coastline, which have been jolted upward by past seismic events.

Diving beneath the hidden depths of silent earthquakes

In December 2018, the research team began a month-long deep-sea cruise, collecting profiles of the seafloor in the northern part of the subduction zone margin, which is studded with large seamounts. “Although other studies have suggested that seamounts may contribute to small, rather than large and destructive earthquakes, it’s been unclear exactly how those mountains interact with the seafloor as they are subducted,” says Chesley.

Chesley’s eye was drawn to two seamounts: the Tūranganui Knoll, located about 110 kilometers southeast of the east coast city of Gisborne, and an unnamed one that is closer to the margin and is currently being subducted. A cluster of tiny earthquakes related to a 2014 slow-slip event occurred around the second seamount, which first began subducting about a million years ago.

Christine Chesley and Eric Attias operate the Scripps Undersea Electromagnetic Source Instrument (SUESI) during a deep-tow. SUESI is attached to the ship via a coaxial cable and must be “flown” about 100 meters above the seafloor. Credit: Kerry Key.

Peeling back the layers of a seamount

Chesley’s team’s electric conductivity survey revealed that each seamount was made up of layers of varying porosity, which held water and conducted electricity differently. Each had a solid core surrounded by a layer of loose, cindery material that acts a bit like a sponge. In fact, the team found that seamounts lock away three to five times more water than typical oceanic crust. This water can act as a lubricant to help tectonic plates glide into Earth’s interior without setting off a large earthquake.

“It makes a lot of sense, knowing how they form, but we really weren’t expecting them to be such heterogeneous masses of rock,” says Chesley. She noted that the nuance in material can really affect how the subducting plate moves and expels water when it is subducted.

Because both seamounts had a similar structure, the researchers think that even actively subducting seamounts retain their structural strength — so much so that they can damage the overriding plate, causing tiny faults that dissipate the energy and result in slow-slip events.

New methods

This study is the first to use electromagnetic methods to map out water trapped in rocks beneath the seafloor offshore, says Susan Ellis, a geophysicist at GNS Science, who was not involved in the study. “Mapping the structure of the seafloor is extremely challenging and has only recently become viable. This research is at the cutting edge of new geophysical imaging methods,” Ellis says.

Electromagnetic receivers can be seen on the back deck of the R/V Roger Revelle during particularly rough seas. Credit: Kerry Key.

“These results are very exciting … they show just how subducting topography can impact water content,” she adds. That, in turn, reveals the type of slipping. “Understanding why slow-slip events occur is critical for estimating New Zealand’s earthquake and tsunami hazard.”

Factoring underwater oddities into hazard models

“Seamounts are very common on the seafloor, but hazard models currently don’t consider how they contribute to slow-slip events,” says Chesley. “Now we know that we need to take seafloor topography into account — otherwise we’re not getting the full picture.”

But Chesley and her team note that slow-slip earthquakes aren’t always subdued. In 1947, two unusual tsunamis were both associated with slow-slip behavior. And because they weren’t preceded by shaking, there was little warning.

“Future work in other locations of the margin, and in other subduction zones with and without seamounts, will help us understand whether there are any other factors that also contribute to slow-slip events,” says Ellis. Or that contribute to a larger event, for that matter.

References:

Chesley, C., Naif, S., Key, K., & Bassett, D. (2021). Fluid-rich subducting topography generates anomalous forearc porosity. Nature, 595(7866), 255-260. doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03619-8

Sun, T., Saffer, D. and Ellis, S., 2020. Mechanical and hydrological effects of seamount subduction on megathrust stress and slip. Nature Geoscience, 13(3), pp.249-255. doi.org/10.1038/s41561-020-0566-5

Wallace, L.M., Webb, S.C., Ito, Y., Mochizuki, K., Hino, R., Henrys, S., Schwartz, S.Y. and Sheehan, A.F., 2016. Slow slip near the trench at the Hikurangi subduction zone, New Zealand. Science, 352(6286), pp.701-704. doi.org/10.1126/science.aaf2349

Wang, K., & Bilek, S. L. (2011). Do subducting seamounts generate or stop large earthquakes? Geology, 39(9), 819-822. doi.org/10.1130/G31856.1

See the full article here .

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

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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: “Swipe Left on the ‘Big One’- Better Dates for Cascadia Quakes”

From AGU

From Eos

8.20.21
Jessie K. Pearl
Lydia Staisch
lstaisch@usgs.gov

The dead trees in this ghost forest in Copalis, Wash., were killed during the last major Cascadia earthquake in January 1700. Credit: Jessie K. Pearl. [Ed.: If it was 1700 C.E., how are they still standing?]

Cascadia plate zones.

Cascadia subduction zone

The CSZ is a tectonic boundary off the coast that has unleashed massive earthquakes and tsunamis as the Juan de Fuca Plate is thrust beneath the North American Plate. And it will do so again. But when? And how big will the earthquake—or earthquakes—be?

The last behemoth earthquake on the CSZ estimated at magnitude 9 struck on 26 January 1700. We know this age with such precision—unique in paleoseismology—because of several lines of geologic proxy evidence that coalesce around that date, in addition to Japanese historical records describing an “orphan tsunami” (a tsunami with no corresponding local earthquake) on that particular date [Atwater et al., 2015*]. Indigenous North American oral histories also describe the event. Geoscientists have robust evidence for other large earthquakes in Cascadia’s past; however, deciphering and precisely dating the geologic record become more difficult the farther back in time you go.

*All cited works in References below.

Precision dating of and magnitude constraints on past earthquakes are critically important for assessing modern CSZ earthquake hazards. Such estimates require knowledge of the area over which the fault has broken in the past; the amount of displacement, or slip, on the fault; the speed at which slip occurred; and the timing of events and their potential to occur in rapid succession (called clustering). The paucity of recent seismicity on the CSZ means our understanding of earthquake recurrence there primarily comes from geologic earthquake proxies, including evidence of coseismic land level changes, tsunami inundations, and strong shaking found in onshore and marine environments (Figure 1). Barring modern earthquakes, increasing the accuracy and precision of paleoseismological records is the only way to better constrain the size and frequency of megathrust ruptures and to improve our understanding of natural variability in CSZ earthquake hazards.

Fig. 1. Age ranges obtained from different geochronologic methods used for estimating Cascadia Subduction Zone megathrust events are shown in this diagram of preservation environments. At top is a dendrochronological analysis comparing a tree killed from a megathrust event with a living specimen. Here ^14C refers to radiocarbon (or carbon-14), and “wiggle-match ^14C” refers to an age model based on multiple, relatively dated (exact number of years known between samples) annual tree ring samples. Schematic sedimentary core observations and sample locations are shown for marsh and deep-sea marine environments. Gray probability distributions for examples of each 14C method are shown to the right of the schematic cores, with 95% confidence ranges in brackets. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL)-based estimates are shown as a gray dot with error bars.

To discuss ideas, frontiers, and the latest research at the intersection of subduction zone science and geochronology, a variety of specialists attended a virtual workshop about earthquake recurrence on the CSZ hosted by the Geological Survey (US) in February 2021. The workshop, which we discuss below, was part of a series that USGS is holding as the agency works on the next update of the National Seismic Hazard Model, due out in 2023.

Paleoseismology Proxies

Cascadia has one of the longest and most spatially complete geologic records of subduction zone earthquakes, stretching back more than 10,000 years along much of the 1,300-kilometer-long margin, yet debate persists over the size and recurrence of great earthquakes [Goldfinger et al., 2012; Atwater et al., 2014]. The uncertainty arises in part because we lack firsthand observations of Cascadia earthquakes. Thus, integrating onshore and offshore proxy records and understanding how different geologic environments record past megathrust ruptures remain important lines of inquiry, as well as major hurdles, in CSZ science. These hurdles are exacerbated by geochronologic data sets that differ in their precision and usefulness in revealing past rupture patches.

One of the most important things to determine is whether proxy evidence records the CSZ rupturing in individual great events (approximately magnitude 9) or in several smaller, clustered earthquakes (approximately magnitude 8) that occur in succession. A magnitude 9 earthquake releases 30 times the energy of a magnitude 8 event, so the consequences of misinterpreting the available data can result in substantial misunderstanding of the seismic hazard.

Geologic proxies of megathrust earthquakes are generated by different aspects of the rupture process and can therefore inform us about specific rupture characteristics and hazards. Some of the best proxy records for CSZ earthquakes lie onshore in coastal environments. Coastal wetlands, for example, record sudden and lasting land-level changes in their stratigraphy and paleoecology when earthquakes cause the wetlands’ surfaces to drop into the tidal range (Figure 1) [Atwater et al., 2015]. The amount of elevation change that occurs during a quake, called “coseismic deformation,” can vary along the coast during a single event because of changes in the magnitude, extent, and style of slip along the fault [e.g., Wirth and Frankel, 2019]. Thus, such records can reveal consistency or heterogeneity in slip during past earthquakes.

Tsunami deposits onshore are also important proxies for understanding coseismic slip distribution. Tsunamis are generated by sudden seafloor deformation and are typically indicative of shallow slip, near the subduction zone trench (Figure 1) [Melgar et al., 2016]. The inland extent of tsunami deposits, and their distribution north and south along the subduction zone, can be used to identify places where an earthquake caused a lot of seafloor deformation and can tell generally how much displacement was required to create the tsunami wave.

Offshore, seafloor sediment cores show coarse layers of debris flows called turbidites that can also serve as great proxies for earthquake timing and ground motion characteristics. Coseismic turbidites result when earthquake shaking causes unstable, steep, submarine canyon walls to fail, creating coarse, turbulent sediment flows. These flows eventually settle on the ocean floor and are dated using radiocarbon measurements of detrital organic-rich material.

Geochronologic Investigations

Fig. 2. These graphs show the age range over which different geochronometers are useful (top), the average record length in Cascadia for different environments (middle), and the average uncertainty for different methods (bottom). Marine sediment cores have the capacity for the longest records, but age controls from detrital material in turbidites have the largest age uncertainties. Radiocarbon (^14C) ages from bracketing in-growth position plants and trees (wiggle matching) have much smaller uncertainties (tens of years) but are not preserved in coastal environments for as long. To optimize the potential range of dendrochronological geochronometers, the reference chronology of coastal tree species must be extended further back in time. The range limit (black arrow) of these geochronometers could thus be extended with improved reference chronologies.

To be useful, proxies must be datable. Scientists primarily use radiocarbon dating to put past earthquakes into temporal context. Correlations in onshore and offshore data sets have been used to infer the occurrence of up to 20 approximately magnitude 9 earthquakes on the CSZ over the past 11,000 years [Goldfinger et al., 2012], although uncertainty in the ages of these events ranges from tens to hundreds of years (Figure 2). These large age uncertainties allow for varying interpretations of the geologic record: Multiple magnitude 8 or magnitude 7 earthquakes that occur over a short period of time (years to decades) could be misidentified as a single huge earthquake. It’s even possible that the most thoroughly examined CSZ earthquake, in 1700, might have comprised a series of smaller earthquakes, not one magnitude 9 event, because the geologic evidence providing precise ages of this event comes from a relatively short stretch of the Cascadia margin [Melgar, 2021].

By far, the best geochronologic age constraints for CSZ earthquakes come from tree ring, or dendrochronological, analyses of well-preserved wood samples [e.g., Yamaguchi et al., 1997], which can provide annual and even seasonal precision (Figure 2). Part of how scientists arrived at the 26 January date for the 1700 quake was by using dendrochronological dating of coastal forests in southwestern Washington that were killed rapidly by coseismic saltwater submergence. Some of the dead western red cedar trees in these “ghost forests” are preserved with their bark intact; thus, they record the last year of their growth. By cross dating the dead trees’ annual growth rings with those in a multicentennial reference chronology derived from nearby living trees, it is evident that the trees died after the 1699 growing season.

The ghost forest, however, confirms only that coseismic submergence in 1700 occurred along the 90 kilometers of the roughly 1,300-kilometer-long Cascadia margin where these western red cedars are found. The trees alone do not confirm that the entire CSZ fault ruptured in a single big one.

Meanwhile, older CSZ events have not been dated with such high accuracy, in part because coseismically killed trees are not ubiquitously distributed and well preserved along the coastline and because there are no millennial-length, species-specific reference chronologies with which to cross date older preserved trees (Figure 2).

Advances in Dating

At the Cascadia Recurrence Workshop earlier this year, researchers presented recent advances and discussed future directions in paleoseismic dating methods. For example, by taking annual radiocarbon measurements from trees killed during coseismic coastal deformation, we can detect dated global atmospheric radiocarbon excursions in these trees, such as the substantial jump in atmospheric radiocarbon between the years 774 and 775 [Miyake et al., 2012]. This method allows us to correlate precise dates from other ghost forests along the Cascadian coast from the time of the 1700 event and to date past megathrust earthquakes older than the 1700 quake without needing millennial-scale reference chronologies [e.g., Pearl et al., 2020]. Such reference chronologies, which were previously required for annual age precision, are time- and labor-intensive to develop. With this method, new data collections from coastal forests that perished in or survived through CSZ earthquakes can now give near-annual dates for both inundations and ecosystem transitions.

Numerous tree rings are evident in this cross section from a subfossil western red cedar from coastal Washington. Patterns in ring widths give clues about when the tree died. Credit: Jessie K. Pearl.

Although there are many opportunities to pursue with dendrochronology, such as dating trees at previously unstudied sites and trees killed by older events, we must supplement this approach with other novel geochronological methods to fill critical data gaps where trees are not preserved. Careful sampling and interpretation of age results from radiocarbon-dated material other than trees can also provide tight age constraints for tsunami and coastal submergence events.

For example, researchers collected soil horizons below (predating) and overlying (postdating) a tsunami deposit in Discovery Bay, Wash., and then radiocarbon dated leaf bases of Triglochin maritima, a type of arrowgrass that grows in brackish and freshwater marsh environments. The tsunami deposits, bracketed by well-dated pretsunami and posttsunami soil horizons, revealed a tsunamigenic CSZ rupture that occurred about 600 years ago on the northern CSZ, perhaps offshore Washington State and Vancouver Island [Garrison-Laney and Miller, 2017].

Multiple bracketing ages can dramatically reduce uncertainty that plagues most other dated horizons, especially those whose ages are based on single dates from detrital organic material (Figure 2). Although the age uncertainty of the 600-year-old earthquake from horizons at Discovery Bay is still on the order of several decades, the improved precision is enough to conclusively distinguish the event from other earthquakes dated along the margin.

Further advancements in radiocarbon dating continue to provide important updates for dating coseismic evidence from offshore records. Marine turbidites do not often contain materials that provide accurate age estimates, but they are a critically important paleoseismic proxy [Howarth et al., 2021]. Turbidite radiocarbon ages rely on correcting for both global and local marine reservoir ages, which are caused by the radiocarbon “memory” of seawater. Global marine reservoir age corrections are systematically updated by experts as we learn more about past climates and their influences on the global marine radiocarbon reservoir [Heaton et al., 2020]. However, samples used to calibrate the local marine reservoir corrections in the Pacific Northwest, which apply only to nearby sites, are unfortunately not well distributed along the CSZ coastline, and little is known about temporal variations in the local correction, leading to larger uncertainty in event ages.

These local corrections could be improved by collecting more sampled material that fills spatial gaps and goes back further in time. At the workshop, researchers presented the exciting development that they were in the process of collecting annual radiocarbon measurements from Pacific geoduck clam shells off the Cascadian coastline to improve local marine reservoir knowledge. Geoducks can live more than 100 years and have annual growth rings that are sensitive to local climate and can therefore be cross dated to the exact year. Thus, a chronology of local climatic variation and marine radiocarbon abundance can be constructed using living and deceased specimens. Annual measurements of radiocarbon derived from marine bivalves, like the geoduck, offer new avenues to generate local marine reservoir corrections and improve age estimates for coseismic turbidity flows.

Putting It All Together

An imminent magnitude 9 megathrust earthquake on the CSZ poses one of the greatest natural hazards in North America and motivates diverse research across the Earth sciences. Continued development of multiple geochronologic approaches will help us to better constrain the timing of past CSZ earthquakes. And integrating earthquake age estimates with the understanding of rupture characteristics inferred from geologic evidence will help us to identify natural variability in past earthquakes and a range of possible future earthquake hazard scenarios.

Useful geochronologic approaches include using optically stimulated luminescence to date tsunami sand deposits (Figure 1) and determining landslide age estimates on the basis of remotely sensed land roughness [e.g., LaHusen et al., 2020]. Of particular value will be focuses on improving high-precision radiocarbon and dendrochronological dating of CSZ earthquakes, paired with precise estimates of subsidence magnitude, tsunami inundation from hydrologic modeling, inferred ground motion characteristics from sedimentological variations in turbidity deposits, and evidence of ground failure in subaerial, lake, and marine settings. Together, such lines of evidence will lead to better correlation of geologic records with specific earthquake rupture characteristics.

Ultimately, characterizing the recurrence of major earthquakes on the CSZ megathrust—which have the potential to drastically affect millions of lives across the region—hinges on the advancement and the integration of diverse geochronologic and geologic records.

References:

Atwater, B. F., et al. (2014), Rethinking turbidite paleoseismology along the Cascadia subduction zone, Geology, 42(9), 827–830, https://doi.org/10.1130/G35902.1.

Atwater, B. F., et al. (2015), The Orphan Tsunami, 2nd ed., U.S. Geol. Surv., Reston, Va.

Garrison-Laney, C., and I. Miller (2017), Tsunamis in the Salish Sea: Recurrence, sources, hazards, in From the Puget Lowland to East of the Cascade Range: Geologic Excursions in the Pacific Northwest, GSA Field Guide, vol. 49, pp. 67–78, Geol. Soc. of Am., Boulder, Colo. https://doi.org/10.1130/2017.0049(04).

Goldfinger, C., et al. (2012), Turbidite event history — Methods and implications for Holocene paleoseismicity of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, U.S. Geol. Surv. Prof. Pap., 1661-F, https://doi.org/10.3133/pp1661F.

Heaton, T. J., et al. (2020), Marine20—The marine radiocarbon age calibration curve (0–55,000 cal BP), Radiocarbon, 62(4), 779–820, https://doi.org/10.1017/RDC.2020.68.

Howarth, J. D., et al. (2021), Calibrating the marine turbidite palaeoseismometer using the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake, Nat. Geosci., 14(3), 161–167, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00692-6.

LaHusen, S. R., et al. (2020), Rainfall triggers more deep-seated landslides than Cascadia earthquakes in the Oregon Coast Range, USA, Sci. Adv., 6(38), eaba6790, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aba6790.

Melgar, D. (2021), Was the January 26th, 1700 Cascadia earthquake part of an event sequence?, EarthArXiv, https://doi.org/10.31223/X5XG78.

Melgar, D., et al. (2016), Kinematic rupture scenarios and synthetic displacement data: An example application to the Cascadia subduction zone, J. Geophys. Res. Solid Earth, 121, 6,658–6,674, https://doi.org/10.1002/2016JB013314.

Miyake, F., et al. (2012), A signature of cosmic-ray increase in AD 774–775 from tree rings in Japan, Nature, 486(7402), 240–242, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11123.

Pearl, J. K., et al. (2020), A late Holocene subfossil Atlantic white cedar tree-ring chronology from the northeastern United States, Quat. Sci. Rev., 228, 106104, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2019.106104.

Wirth, E. A., and A. D. Frankel (2019), Impact of down-dip rupture limit and high-stress drop subevents on coseismic land-level change during Cascadia Megathrust earthquakes, Bull. Seismol. Soc. Am., 109(6), 2,187–2,197, https://doi.org/10.1785/0120190043.

Yamaguchi, D. K., et al. (1997), Tree-ring dating the 1700 Cascadia earthquake, Nature, 389(6654), 922–923, https://doi.org/10.1038/40048.

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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 University of Delaware (US) : “Undersea rocks yield earthquake clues”

From University of Delaware (US)

August 05, 2021
Article by Tracey Bryant
Photos by
Thomas Morrow
Darin Schwartz
Jessica Warren

UD study of ocean rocks informs earthquake science.

Jessica Warren, University of Delaware associate professor of geological sciences, aboard the R/V Atlantis on a scientific mission to collect geological samples from the East Pacific Rise, an undersea ocean ridge where huge slabs of Earth’s crust are moving apart.

Earthquakes shake and rattle the world every day. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has estimated the number of earthquakes at some half a million a year, with some 100,000 that can be felt, and about 100 that cause damage. Some of these powerful temblors have devastated nations, cutting short thousands of lives and costing billions of dollars for economic recovery.

When will the next big earthquake occur? Answering that question has teams of scientists monitoring areas such as California’s San Andreas Fault and Turkey’s North Anatolian Fault. But these seismically active areas on land, at the boundaries of tectonic plates, are not the only places of intense study. Jessica Warren, associate professor of geological sciences at the University of Delaware, is exploring the middle of the ocean where earthquakes with a magnitude 6 on the Richter scale routinely occur, and what she is finding may help scientists predict earthquakes on land.

UDaily connected with Warren to learn more about her most recent study, which published in Nature Geoscience on Aug. 5, 2021.

Q. How did you get started on this research?

Warren: This work grew out of a previous study with seafloor rocks and involved my colleagues Arjun Kohli, who is now a research scientist at Stanford University (US), Monica Wolfson-Schwehr, who is now a research assistant professor at the The Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping (US) University of Hew Hampshire (US), and Cécile Prigent, a former postdoc in my group who is now a professor at the University of Paris [Université de Paris](FR). This interesting group of people had all different areas of expertise to bring to the project. The National Science Foundation (US) provided funding support.

Cécile Prigent is shown aboard the R/V Atlantis with rock samples collected from the Pacific Ocean floor. The former UD postdoctoral researcher is now on the faculty at the University of Paris.

Q: What kinds of rocks did you study and how did you get them?

Warren: The rocks came from big fault structures underwater that are on par with the San Andreas Fault. It’s costly to get them because they are so far out at sea and it takes specialized equipment. At the end of 2019, we were in a research vessel in the Pacific Ocean above one of these faults on the East Pacific Rise, pulling buckets along the seafloor to collect samples. Most of the samples, however, had been sitting around in various collections — some were collected over 40 years ago from the seafloor.

Q: Could you describe the rocks a bit?

Warren: Underwater ocean ridges are areas of volcanic activity where magma from deep within Earth’s crust erupts and then cools and solidifies. The faults that we look at cut across these ocean ridges, creating steps in the ridge system. The top layer of rock on these ridges is basalt, a black, fine-grained rock rich in magnesium and iron, which is underlain by coarser-grained gabbro, and below it is peridotite, which is often dark green due to the quantity of the mineral olivine — another name for the gemstone peridot — that it contains.

As you go deeper, rocks in the crust actually flow, like glaciers flow. This occurs at 4 miles deep in the Pacific Ocean floor, and 10 miles deep in the seafloor of the Atlantic Ocean, which is colder. The rocks you see in the fault at that point are mylonites — they are dark gray, stretched-out, deformed rocks — some call them Silly Putty. They can flow much faster than the normal rocks because they are super fine-grained (atoms in the rock move around faster when the grains are smaller). They are absolutely beautiful rocks!

Peridotite is one of the most common rocks found in undersea fault zones. This image shows, at top, fresh peridotite along with a microscopic view of the mineral; and, at bottom, peridotite that has been altered from seawater that infiltrated deep within the fault.

Q: What do the rocks tell you about earthquakes?

Warren: The big finding we have made is that these faults, or cracks, have a lot of seawater going down into them very deep — more than 10 miles below the seafloor, which is very deep. When water gets into the rock, it reacts with it. This seawater infiltration is a weakening force, so the rock can flow almost as fast as it can slip.

Earthquakes are run-away slip events that occur as rocks slide past each other. We found that seawater infiltration causes the crystallization of tiny grains of minerals and these allow the rock to creep along instead of having a run-away slip event.

Q. Could you draw on this finding to stop an earthquake from happening on land?

Warren: There’s no way to stop large earthquakes from occurring. But it would improve our ability to predict – by understanding the properties – what gives us rock creep vs. a sharp slip. There is also a creeping segment of the San Andreas fault. We can’t make the rest of the fault like that. But we could better predict how and when these various fault systems are going to fail.

Q. What will happen to the information you’ve developed, and what’s up next?

Warren: You have to know the rock properties to understand what happens in fault zones and earthquakes. We have done modeling work that is more a way to test and extrapolate how rocks deform against each other. We have done a lot of straightforward calculations validating the strength of the rocks. We now need more direct observations of the faults on the seafloor itself. The submersible Alvin would be one of the ideal vehicles for doing this. That would contribute to our understanding of the seismicity of certain patches versus other patches that sort of stop it.

Q. What led you into this work?

Warren: I fell in love with geology through field work in college, and then I fell in love with going to sea to do field work in graduate school. I also love looking at samples in the lab, seeing the textures and uncovering the history of the rock and what it’s telling us about the Earth.

Jessica Warren aboard the R/V Atlantis in the Pacific Ocean.

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One of the oldest universities in the U.S., the University of Delaware (US) traces its roots to 1743 when a petition by the Presbytery of Lewes expressing the need for an educated clergy led the Rev. Dr. Francis Alison to open a school in New London, Pennsylvania.

Alison’s first class was “possibly the most distinguished in terms of the later achievements of its members, taken as a whole, of any class in any school in America,” wrote historian John Munroe.

Those first students would go on to become statesmen, doctors, merchants and scholars. Thomas McKean, George Read and James Smith signed the Declaration of Independence, and Read also signed the U.S. Constitution.

By 1765, Alison’s school relocated to Newark. NewArk College opened as a degree-granting institution in 1834 and was renamed Delaware College in 1843. In 1867, the college was designated one of the nation’s historic Land Grant colleges.

A women’s college opened in 1914 with 58 students, and in 1921, the two colleges joined to become the University of Delaware.

Since 1950, UD has quadrupled its enrollment and greatly expanded its faculty and academics and its influence in the world.

In 2009, the University purchased a 272-acre parcel of land adjacent to the Newark campus that previously had been a Chrysler Plant. That site, now the Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) Campus, is home to the University’s Health Sciences Complex and is being developed as a space combining business, research, education and more.

From Science Alert (US) and Live Science (US) : “Yellowstone Just Recorded Over 1000 Earthquakes in One Month. Should We Be Worried?”

From Science Alert (US)

and

Live Science (US)

6 AUGUST 2021
BRANDON SPECKTOR

Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park. Credit: Xin Wang/iStock/Getty Images.

The Earth is rumbling beneath Yellowstone National Park again, with swarms of more than 1,000 earthquakes recorded in the region in July 2021, according to a new Geological Survey (US) report. This is the most seismic activity the park has seen in a single month since June 2017, when a swarm of more than 1,100 rattled the area, the report said.

Fortunately, these earthquakes were minor ones, with only four temblors measuring in the magnitude-3 range (strong enough to be felt, but unlikely to cause any damage) – and none of the quakes signal that the supervolcano underneath the park is likely to blow, park seismologists said.

“While above average, this level of seismicity is not unprecedented, and it does not reflect magmatic activity,” according to the USGS report. “If magmatic activity were the cause of the quakes, we would expect to see other indicators, like changes in deformation style or thermal/gas emissions, but no such variations were detected.”

Throughout July 2021, The University of Utah (US) Seismograph Stations, which are responsible for monitoring and analyzing quakes in the Yellowstone park region, recorded a total of 1,008 earthquakes in the area. These quakes came in a series of seven swarms, with the most energetic event occurring on July 16.

According to the USGS, at least 764 quakes rattled the ground deep below Yellowstone Lake that day, including a magnitude-3.6 earthquake – the single largest of the month.

The month’s remaining six swarms were all smaller, including between 12 and 40 earthquakes apiece, all measuring below magnitude 3, the report said.

These quakes are nothing to worry about, the USGS added, noting that the earth-shaking is likely the result of motion on preexisting faults below the park. Fault movements can be stimulated by melting snow, which increases the amount of groundwater seeping under the park and increases pressure levels underground, the researchers said.

Yellowstone is one of the most seismically active regions in the US; the area is typically hit by anywhere from 700 to 3,000 earthquakes a year, most of which are imperceptible to visitors, according to the National Park Service. The biggest quake on record in Yellowstone was the magnitude-7.3 Hebgen Lake quake, in 1959.

Why so shaky? The park sits atop a network of fault lines associated with an enormous volcano buried deep beneath the ground (this volcano last erupted about 70,000 years ago, according to the USGS).

The magma chamber below Yellowstone is more than twice the size thought Image: GETTY/WIKI)

Earthquakes occur as the region’s fault lines stretch apart, and as magma, water and gas move beneath the surface. These features also feed the park’s reliable geysers and steamy hot springs.

The Yellowstone volcano has erupted several times in the past, with gargantuan eruptions occurring every 725,000 years or so. If this schedule is accurate, the park is due for another big eruption in about 100,000 years.

Such an eruption would devastate the entire United States, clogging rivers with ash across the continent and causing widespread drought and famine.

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From Stanford University (US) : “Stanford scientists test friction laws in the collapsing crater of an erupting volcano”

From Stanford University (US)

July 28, 2021

Media Contacts

Josie Garthwaite
School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences
(650)497-0947;
josieg@stanford.edu

Paul Segall
School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences
segall@stanford.edu

Kyle Anderson
U.S. Geological Survey
kranderson@usgs.gov

A wide-angle aerial view looks southeast over Kīlauea’s summit caldera on July 22, 2021. Large cliffs formed during the 2018 collapses are visible on the left side of the photo. A recently active lava lake is visible in the lower right. Credit: M. Patrick, Geological Survey (US).

On April 30, 2018 on the eastern flank of Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano lava suddenly drained from a crater that had been spewing lava for more than three decades. Then the floor of the crater named Pu’u’ō’ō dropped out.

Within 48 hours, the lava lake at Kīlauea’s summit 12 miles northwest of Pu’u’ō’ō began to fall as magma drained into the volcano’s plumbing. Soon, new cracks opened 12 miles east of Pu’u’ō’ō and molten lava spurted out, crept over roads, burned trees and torched power poles.

Over three months Kīlauea spat out enough lava to fill 320000 Olympic-sized swimming pools and destroyed more than 700 homes and displaced thousands of people. The summit landscape itself was transformed as its crater collapsed by as much as 1500 feet throughout the summer in a way that scientists are only beginning to understand.

“In the entire 60 years of modern geophysical instrumentation of volcanoes, we’ve had only half a dozen caldera collapses,” said Stanford University geophysicist Paul Segall, lead author of a new study in PNAS that helps explain how these events unfold and finds evidence confirming the reigning scientific paradigm for how friction works on earthquake faults.

The results may help to inform future hazard assessments and mitigation efforts around volcanic eruptions. “Improving our understanding of the physics governing caldera collapses will help us to better understand the conditions under which collapses are possible and forecast the evolution of a collapse sequence once it begins,” said co-author Kyle Anderson, PhD ’12, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey who was part of the team working on-site at Kīlauea during the 2018 eruption.

The nature of friction

A key factor controlling the collapse of volcanic calderas-and the rupture of earthquake faults around the world-is friction. It’s ubiquitous in nature and our everyday lives, coming into play any time two surfaces move relative to each other. But interactions between surfaces are so complex that, despite centuries of study, scientists still don’t completely understand how friction behaves in different situations. “It’s not something that we can entirely predict using only equations. We also need data from experiments,” Segall said.

Scientists seeking to understand the role of friction in earthquakes usually run these experiments in labs using rock slabs barely larger than a door and often closer to the size of a deck of cards. “One of the big challenges in earthquake science has been to take these friction laws and the values that were found in the laboratory, and apply them to, say, the San Andreas Fault, because it’s such an enormous jump in scale,” said Segall, the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Professor of Geophysics at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

In the new study, published July 23, Segall and Anderson examine the slipping and sticking of Kīlauea volcano’s collapse block – a chunk of crust five miles around and half a mile deep – to characterize friction at a much larger scale. “We set out to develop a mathematical model of that collapse, highly simplified, but using modern understanding of friction,” Segall said.

Changes at the summit of Kīlauea between April 14 and Aug. 20, 2018, were captured by a USGS-Hawaiian Volcano Observatory camera. This time-lapse series includes roughly one image per day. (USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (US))

Kīlauea’s collapse

Kīlauea’s caldera collapsed not in one smooth descent but rather like a sticky piston. Roughly every day and a half the collapse block dropped by nearly eight feet in a matter of seconds and then stopped. That’s because as magma in the chamber below the caldera surged out to fissures in Kīlauea’s lower eastern flank, it took away support for the overlying rock. “Eventually, the pressure becomes low enough that the floor falls in and it starts collapsing, like a sinkhole,” Segall said.

By the time the 2018 Kīlauea eruption ended, the volcano’s piston-like collapse events repeated 62 times – with each one triggering an earthquake and every move tracked down to the millimeter every five seconds by an array of 20 global positioning system (GPS) instruments. During the first few dozen collapse events, the geometry of the rock surfaces changed, but they held stable for the final 30 halting descents.

The new research shows that for this type of eruption, when the eruptive vent is at a lower elevation, it leads to a bigger drop in pressure below the caldera block – which then makes it more likely that a collapse event will start. Once collapse initiates, the weight of the massive caldera block maintains pressure on the magma, forcing it to the eruption site. “If not for the collapse, the eruption would have undoubtedly ended much sooner,” Segall said.

Evolving friction

Segall and Anderson’s analysis of the trove of data from Kīlauea’s caldera collapse confirms that, even at the vast scale of this volcano, the ways different rock surfaces slip and slide past one another or stick at different speeds and pressures over time are very similar to what scientists have found in small-scale laboratory experiments.

The summit lava lake of Kīlauea volcano in May 2018, roughly 220 meters below the crater rim. Credit: USGS.

Specifically, the new results provide an upper bound for an important factor in earthquake mechanics known as slip-weakening distance, which geophysicists use to calculate how faults become unstuck. This is the distance over which the frictional strength of a fault weakens before rupturing – something that’s central to accurate modeling of the stability and buildup of energy on earthquake faults. Laboratory experiments have suggested this distance could be as short as tens of microns – equivalent to the width of a hair spliced into a few dozen slivers – while estimates from real earthquakes indicate it could be as long as 20 centimeters.

The new modeling now shows this evolution occurs over no more than 10 millimeters, and possibly much less. “The uncertainties are bigger than they are in the lab, but the friction properties are completely consistent with what’s measured in the laboratory, and that’s very confirming,” Segall said. “It tells us that we’re okay taking those measurements from really small samples and applying them to big tectonic faults because they held true in the behavior we observed in Kīlauea’s collapse.”

The new work also adds realistic complexity to a mathematical piston model, proposed a decade ago by Japanese volcanologist Hiroyuki Kumagai and colleagues, to explain a large caldera collapse on Miyake Island, Japan. While the widely embraced Kumagai model assumed the volcano’s rock surfaces changed as if by flipping a switch from being stationary relative to each other to slipping past one another, the new modeling recognizes that the transition between “static” and “dynamic” friction is more complex and gradual. “Nothing in nature occurs instantaneously,” Segall said.

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Stanford University campus. No image credit

Stanford University (US)

Leland and Jane Stanford founded the University to “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.” Stanford opened its doors in 1891, and more than a century later, it remains dedicated to finding solutions to the great challenges of the day and to preparing our students for leadership in today’s complex world. Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto. Since 1952, more than 54 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize, including 19 current faculty members.

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university located in Stanford, California. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford is consistently ranked as among the most prestigious and top universities in the world by major education publications. It is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator and former governor of California who made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Stanford University struggled financially after the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.

The university is organized around seven schools: three schools consisting of 40 academic departments at the undergraduate level as well as four professional schools that focus on graduate programs in law, medicine, education, and business. All schools are on the same campus. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 126 NCAA team championships, and Stanford has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup for 24 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995. In addition, Stanford students and alumni have won 270 Olympic medals including 139 gold medals.

As of October 2020, 84 Nobel laureates, 28 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. In addition, Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, roughly equivalent to the 7th largest economy in the world (as of 2020). Stanford is the alma mater of one president of the United States (Herbert Hoover), 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.

Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford’s previous Palo Alto farm.

Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great eastern universities, most specifically Cornell University. Stanford opened being called the “Cornell of the West” in 1891 due to faculty being former Cornell affiliates (either professors, alumni, or both) including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to have higher education be accessible, nonsectarian, and open to women as well as to men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt this radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.

Despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)(originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.

Land

Most of Stanford is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km^2) campus, one of the largest in the United States. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.

Stanford’s main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.

Non-central campus

Stanford currently operates in various locations outside of its central campus.

On the founding grant:

Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 1,200-acre (490 ha) natural reserve south of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, 2 miles (3.2 km) on 426 acres (172 ha) of land.
Golf course and a seasonal lake: The university also has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lake Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), both home to the vulnerable California tiger salamander. As of 2012 Lake Lagunita was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it.

Off the founding grant:

Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.
Study abroad locations: unlike typical study abroad programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a “mini-Stanford”.

Redwood City campus for many of the university’s administrative offices located in Redwood City, California, a few miles north of the main campus. In 2005, the university purchased a small, 35-acre (14 ha) campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by The Great Recession. In 2015 the university announced a development plan and the Redwood City campus opened in March 2019.

The Bass Center in Washington, DC provides a base, including housing, for the Stanford in Washington program for undergraduates. It includes a small art gallery open to the public.

China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with Beijing University [北京大学](CN) (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University(CN) (KIAA-PKU).

Administration and organization

Stanford is a private, non-profit university that is administered as a corporate trust governed by a privately appointed board of trustees with a maximum membership of 38. Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually.[83] A new trustee is chosen by the current trustees by ballot. The Stanford trustees also oversee the Stanford Research Park, the Stanford Shopping Center, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Medical Center, and many associated medical facilities (including the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital).

The board appoints a president to serve as the chief executive officer of the university, to prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, to manage financial and business affairs, and to appoint nine vice presidents. The provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report. Persis Drell became the 13th provost in February 2017.

As of 2018, the university was organized into seven academic schools. The schools of Humanities and Sciences (27 departments), Engineering (nine departments), and Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (four departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of Law, Medicine, Education and Business have graduate programs only. The powers and authority of the faculty are vested in the Academic Council, which is made up of tenure and non-tenure line faculty, research faculty, senior fellows in some policy centers and institutes, the president of the university, and some other academic administrators, but most matters are handled by the Faculty Senate, made up of 55 elected representatives of the faculty.

The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is the student government for Stanford and all registered students are members. Its elected leadership consists of the Undergraduate Senate elected by the undergraduate students, the Graduate Student Council elected by the graduate students, and the President and Vice President elected as a ticket by the entire student body.

Stanford is the beneficiary of a special clause in the California Constitution, which explicitly exempts Stanford property from taxation so long as the property is used for educational purposes.

Endowment and donations

The university’s endowment, managed by the Stanford Management Company, was valued at $27.7 billion as of August 31, 2019. Payouts from the Stanford endowment covered approximately 21.8% of university expenses in the 2019 fiscal year. In the 2018 NACUBO-TIAA survey of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, only Harvard University(US), the University of Texas System(US), and Yale University(US) had larger endowments than Stanford.

In 2006, President John L. Hennessy launched a five-year campaign called the Stanford Challenge, which reached its $4.3 billion fundraising goal in 2009, two years ahead of time, but continued fundraising for the duration of the campaign. It concluded on December 31, 2011, having raised a total of $6.23 billion and breaking the previous campaign fundraising record of $3.88 billion held by Yale. Specifically, the campaign raised $253.7 million for undergraduate financial aid, as well as $2.33 billion for its initiative in “Seeking Solutions” to global problems, $1.61 billion for “Educating Leaders” by improving K-12 education, and $2.11 billion for “Foundation of Excellence” aimed at providing academic support for Stanford students and faculty. Funds supported 366 new fellowships for graduate students, 139 new endowed chairs for faculty, and 38 new or renovated buildings. The new funding also enabled the construction of a facility for stem cell research; a new campus for the business school; an expansion of the law school; a new Engineering Quad; a new art and art history building; an on-campus concert hall; a new art museum; and a planned expansion of the medical school, among other things. In 2012, the university raised $1.035 billion, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Research centers and institutes

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)
Stanford Research Institute, a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.
Hoover Institution, a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, a multidisciplinary design school in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute of University of Potsdam [Universität Potsdam](DE) that integrates product design, engineering, and business management education).
Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, which grew out of and still contains the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project.
John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Center for Ocean Solutions
Together with UC Berkeley(US) and UC San Francisco(US), Stanford is part of the Biohub, a new medical science research center founded in 2016 by a $600 million commitment from Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan.

Discoveries and innovation

Natural sciences

Biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) – Arthur Kornberg synthesized DNA material and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his work at Stanford.
First Transgenic organism – Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine.
Laser – Arthur Leonard Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers.
Nuclear magnetic resonance – Felix Bloch developed new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements, which are the underlying principles of the MRI.

Computer and applied sciences

ARPANET – Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes.

Internet—Stanford was the site where the original design of the Internet was undertaken. Vint Cerf led a research group to elaborate the design of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) that he originally co-created with Robert E. Kahn (Bob Kahn) in 1973 and which formed the basis for the architecture of the Internet.

Frequency modulation synthesis – John Chowning of the Music department invented the FM music synthesis algorithm in 1967, and Stanford later licensed it to Yamaha Corporation.

Google – Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford. They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library” and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.

Klystron tube – invented by the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian at Stanford. Their prototype was completed and demonstrated successfully on August 30, 1937. Upon publication in 1939, news of the klystron immediately influenced the work of U.S. and UK researchers working on radar equipment.

RISC – ARPA funded VLSI project of microprocessor design. Stanford and UC Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. The Stanford MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley RISC gave its name to the entire concept, commercialized as the SPARC. Another success from this era were IBM’s efforts that eventually led to the IBM POWER instruction set architecture, PowerPC, and Power ISA. As these projects matured, a wide variety of similar designs flourished in the late 1980s and especially the early 1990s, representing a major force in the Unix workstation market as well as embedded processors in laser printers, routers and similar products.
SUN workstation – Andy Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation, which led to Sun Microsystems.

Businesses and entrepreneurship

Stanford is one of the most successful universities in creating companies and licensing its inventions to existing companies; it is often held up as a model for technology transfer. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing is responsible for commercializing university research, intellectual property, and university-developed projects.

The university is described as having a strong venture culture in which students are encouraged, and often funded, to launch their own companies.

Companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world.

Some companies closely associated with Stanford and their connections include:

Hewlett-Packard, 1939, co-founders William R. Hewlett (B.S, PhD) and David Packard (M.S).
Silicon Graphics, 1981, co-founders James H. Clark (Associate Professor) and several of his grad students.
Sun Microsystems, 1982, co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.B.A), Andy Bechtolsheim (PhD) and Scott McNealy (M.B.A).
Cisco, 1984, founders Leonard Bosack (M.S) and Sandy Lerner (M.S) who were in charge of Stanford Computer Science and Graduate School of Business computer operations groups respectively when the hardware was developed.[163]
Yahoo!, 1994, co-founders Jerry Yang (B.S, M.S) and David Filo (M.S).
Google, 1998, co-founders Larry Page (M.S) and Sergey Brin (M.S).
LinkedIn, 2002, co-founders Reid Hoffman (B.S), Konstantin Guericke (B.S, M.S), Eric Lee (B.S), and Alan Liu (B.S).
Instagram, 2010, co-founders Kevin Systrom (B.S) and Mike Krieger (B.S).
Snapchat, 2011, co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (B.S).
Coursera, 2012, co-founders Andrew Ng (Associate Professor) and Daphne Koller (Professor, PhD).

Student body

Stanford enrolled 6,996 undergraduate and 10,253 graduate students as of the 2019–2020 school year. Women comprised 50.4% of undergraduates and 41.5% of graduate students. In the same academic year, the freshman retention rate was 99%.

Stanford awarded 1,819 undergraduate degrees, 2,393 master’s degrees, 770 doctoral degrees, and 3270 professional degrees in the 2018–2019 school year. The four-year graduation rate for the class of 2017 cohort was 72.9%, and the six-year rate was 94.4%. The relatively low four-year graduation rate is a function of the university’s coterminal degree (or “coterm”) program, which allows students to earn a master’s degree as a 1-to-2-year extension of their undergraduate program.

As of 2010, fifteen percent of undergraduates were first-generation students.

Athletics

As of 2016 Stanford had 16 male varsity sports and 20 female varsity sports, 19 club sports and about 27 intramural sports. In 1930, following a unanimous vote by the Executive Committee for the Associated Students, the athletic department adopted the mascot “Indian.” The Indian symbol and name were dropped by President Richard Lyman in 1972, after objections from Native American students and a vote by the student senate. The sports teams are now officially referred to as the “Stanford Cardinal,” referring to the deep red color, not the cardinal bird. Stanford is a member of the Pac-12 Conference in most sports, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in several other sports, and the America East Conference in field hockey with the participation in the inter-collegiate NCAA’s Division I FBS.

Its traditional sports rival is the University of California, Berkeley, the neighbor to the north in the East Bay. The winner of the annual “Big Game” between the Cal and Cardinal football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe.

Stanford has had at least one NCAA team champion every year since the 1976–77 school year and has earned 126 NCAA national team titles since its establishment, the most among universities, and Stanford has won 522 individual national championships, the most by any university. Stanford has won the award for the top-ranked Division 1 athletic program—the NACDA Directors’ Cup, formerly known as the Sears Cup—annually for the past twenty-four straight years. Stanford athletes have won medals in every Olympic Games since 1912, winning 270 Olympic medals total, 139 of them gold. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, and 2016 Summer Olympics, Stanford won more Olympic medals than any other university in the United States. Stanford athletes won 16 medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics (12 gold, two silver and two bronze), and 27 medals at the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Traditions

The unofficial motto of Stanford, selected by President Jordan, is Die Luft der Freiheit weht. Translated from the German language, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means, “The wind of freedom blows.” The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official.
Hail, Stanford, Hail! is the Stanford Hymn sometimes sung at ceremonies or adapted by the various University singing groups. It was written in 1892 by mechanical engineering professor Albert W. Smith and his wife, Mary Roberts Smith (in 1896 she earned the first Stanford doctorate in Economics and later became associate professor of Sociology), but was not officially adopted until after a performance on campus in March 1902 by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
“Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman”: Stanford does not award honorary degrees, but in 1953 the degree of “Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman” was created to recognize individuals who give rare and extraordinary service to the University. Technically, this degree is awarded by the Stanford Associates, a voluntary group that is part of the university’s alumni association. As Stanford’s highest honor, it is not conferred at prescribed intervals, but only when appropriate to recognize extraordinary service. Recipients include Herbert Hoover, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Lucile Packard, and John Gardner.
Big Game events: The events in the week leading up to the Big Game vs. UC Berkeley, including Gaieties (a musical written, composed, produced, and performed by the students of Ram’s Head Theatrical Society).
“Viennese Ball”: a formal ball with waltzes that was initially started in the 1970s by students returning from the now-closed Stanford in Vienna overseas program. It is now open to all students.
“Full Moon on the Quad”: An annual event at Main Quad, where students gather to kiss one another starting at midnight. Typically organized by the Junior class cabinet, the festivities include live entertainment, such as music and dance performances.
“Band Run”: An annual festivity at the beginning of the school year, where the band picks up freshmen from dorms across campus while stopping to perform at each location, culminating in a finale performance at Main Quad.
“Mausoleum Party”: An annual Halloween Party at the Stanford Mausoleum, the final resting place of Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents. A 20-year tradition, the “Mausoleum Party” was on hiatus from 2002 to 2005 due to a lack of funding, but was revived in 2006. In 2008, it was hosted in Old Union rather than at the actual Mausoleum, because rain prohibited generators from being rented. In 2009, after fundraising efforts by the Junior Class Presidents and the ASSU Executive, the event was able to return to the Mausoleum despite facing budget cuts earlier in the year.
Former campus traditions include the “Big Game bonfire” on Lake Lagunita (a seasonal lake usually dry in the fall), which was formally ended in 1997 because of the presence of endangered salamanders in the lake bed.

Award laureates and scholars

Stanford’s current community of scholars includes:

19 Nobel Prize laureates (as of October 2020, 85 affiliates in total)
171 members of the National Academy of Sciences
109 members of National Academy of Engineering
76 members of National Academy of Medicine
288 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
19 recipients of the National Medal of Science
1 recipient of the National Medal of Technology
4 recipients of the National Humanities Medal
49 members of American Philosophical Society
56 fellows of the American Physics Society (since 1995)
4 Pulitzer Prize winners
31 MacArthur Fellows
4 Wolf Foundation Prize winners
2 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners
14 AAAI fellows
2 Presidential Medal of Freedom winners

From Eos: “Tiny Kinks Record Ancient Quakes”

From AGU

From Eos

19 July 2021
Alka Tripathy-Lang
alka.trip@gmail.com

A kinked muscovite grain embedded within a fine-grained, highly deformed matrix of other minerals displays asymmetric kink bands. Credit: Erik Anderson.

Every so often, somewhere beneath our feet, rocks rupture, and an earthquake begins. With big enough ruptures, we might feel an earthquake as seismic waves radiate to or along the surface. However, a mere 15% to 20% of the energy needed to break rocks in the first place translates into seismicity, scientists suspect.

The remaining energy can dissipate as frictional heat, leaving behind melted planes of glassy rock called pseudotachylyte. The leftover energy may also fracture, pulverize, or deform rocks that surround the rupture as it rushes through the crust, said Erik Anderson, a doctoral student at the University of Maine (US). Because these processes occur kilometers below Earth’s surface, scientists cannot directly observe them when modern earthquakes strike. Shear zones millions of years old that now reside at the surface can provide windows into the rocks around ancient ruptures. However, although seismogenically altered rocks remain at depth, heat and pressure can erase clues of past quakes, said Anderson. “We need some other proxy,” he said, “when we’re looking for evidence of earthquakes in the rock record.”

Micas—sheetlike minerals that can stack together in individual crystals that often provide the sparkle in kitchen countertops—can preserve deformation features that look like microscopic chevrons. On geology’s macroscale, chevrons form in layered strata. In minuscule sheaves of mica, petrologists observe similar pointy folds because the structure of the mica leaves it prone to kinking, rather than buckling or folding, said Frans Aben, a rock physicist at University College London (UK).

In a new article in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Anderson and his colleagues argue that these microstructures—called kink bands—often mark bygone earthquake ruptures and might outlast other indicators of seismicity.

Ancient Kink Bands, Explosive Explanation

To observe kinked micas, scientists must carefully cut rocks into slivers thinner than the typical width of a human hair and affix each rock slice to a piece of glass. By using high-powered microscopes to examine this rock and glass combination (aptly called a thin section), Anderson and his colleagues compared kink bands from two locations in Maine, both more than 300 million years old. The first location is rife with telltale signs of a dynamically deformed former seismogenic zone, like shattered garnets and pseudotachylyte. The second location exposes rocks that changed slowly, under relatively static conditions.

Comparing the geometry of the kink bands from these sites, the researchers observed differences in the thicknesses and symmetries of the microstructures. In particular, samples from the dynamically deformed location display thin-sided, asymmetric kinks. The more statically deformed samples showcase equally proportioned points with thicker limbs.

Kink bands, said Aben, can be added to a growing list of indicators of seismic activity in otherwise cryptic shear zones. The data, he said, “speak for themselves.” Aben was not involved in this study.

To further cement the link between earthquakes and kink band geometry, Anderson and colleagues analyzed 1960s era studies largely driven by the development of nuclear weapons. During that time, scientists strove to understand how shock waves emanated from sites of sudden, rapid, massive perturbations like those produced at nuclear test sites or meteor impact craters. Micas developed kink bands at such sites, as well as in complementary laboratory experiments, said Anderson, and they mimic the geometric patterns produced by dynamic strain rate events—like earthquakes. “[Kink band] geometry,” Anderson said, “is directly linked to the mode of deformation.”

Stressing Rocks, Kinking Micas

In addition to exploring whether kinked mica geometry could fingerprint relics of earthquake ruptures, Anderson and his colleagues estimated the magnitude of localized, transient stress their samples experienced as an earthquake’s rupture front propagated through the rocks, he said. In other words, he asked, might the geometry of kinked micas scale with the magnitude of momentary stress that kinked the micas in the first place?

By extrapolating data from previously published laboratory experiments, Anderson estimated that pulverizing rocks at the deepest depths at which earthquakes can nucleate requires up to 2 gigapascals of stress. Although stress doesn’t directly correspond to pressure, 2 gigapascals are equivalent to more than 7,200 times the pressure inside a car tire inflated to 40 pounds per square inch. For reference, the unimaginably crushing pressure in the deepest part of the ocean—the Mariana Trench—is only about 400 times the pressure in that same tire.

By the same conversion, kinking micas requires stresses 8–30 times the water pressure in the deepest ocean. Because Anderson found pulverized garnets proximal to kinked micas at the fault-filled field site, he and his colleagues inferred that the stresses momentarily experienced by these rocks as an earthquake’s rupture tore through the shear zone were about 1 gigapascal, or 9 times the pressure at the Mariana Trench.

Aben described this transient stress estimate for earthquakes as speculative, but he said the new study’s focus on earthquake-induced deformation fills a gap in research between very slow rock deformation that builds mountains and extremely rapid deformation that occurs during nuclear weapons testing and meteor impacts. And with micas, he said, “once they’re kinked, they will remain kinked,” preserving records of ancient earthquakes in the hearts of mountains.

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.