Caltech

Articles tagged with "earthquakes"

01/17/2014

Lessons from the 1994 Northridge Quake

Cynthia Eller

Since the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake 20 years ago, researchers at Caltech have learned much more about where earthquakes are likely to happen, and how danger to human life and damage to property might be mitigated when they do occur.

02/11/2013

Under the Hood of the Earthquake Machine

Douglas Smith

What makes an earthquake go off? Why are earthquakes so difficult to forecast? Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Geophysics Nadia Lapusta gives us a close-up look at the moving parts, as it were, at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, in Caltech's Beckman Auditorium. Admission is free.

01/09/2013

Faulty Behavior

Katie Neith

In an earthquake, ground motion is the result of waves emitted when the two sides of a fault move—or slip—rapidly past each other, with an average relative speed of about three feet per second. Not all fault segments move so quickly, however—some slip slowly, through a process called creep, and are considered to be "stable," or not capable of hosting rapid earthquake-producing slip. One common hypothesis suggests that such creeping fault behavior is persistent over time, with currently stable segments acting as barriers to fast-slipping, shake-producing earthquake ruptures. But a new study by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) shows that this might not be true.

12/06/2012

Calculated science

Shayna Chabner McKinney

One of the most powerful computer clusters available to a single department in the academic world just got stronger. The California Institute of Technology's CITerra supercomputer, a high-performance computing cluster of the type popularly known as a Beowulf cluster, was replaced this year with a faster and more efficient system.

10/17/2012

Drop, Cover, and Hold On!

Andrew Allan

Get ready to drop, cover, and hold on! On Thursday, October 18, Caltech will once again participate in the Great California ShakeOut, the annual statewide earthquake-preparedness drill. Caltech students, faculty, staff, and visitors are encouraged to join the more than 8 million Californians who will have the opportunity to practice how to protect themselves during an earthquake.

07/19/2012

An Earthquake in a Maze

Kimm Fesenmaier

The powerful magnitude-8.6 earthquake that shook Sumatra on April 11, 2012, was a seismic standout for many reasons, not the least of which is that it was larger than scientists thought an earthquake of its type could ever be. Now, as Caltech researchers report on their findings from the first high-resolution observations of the underwater temblor, they point out that the earthquake was also unusually complex-rupturing along multiple faults that lie at nearly right angles to one another, as though racing through a maze.

06/18/2012

Put a Seismometer in Your Living Room

Douglas Smith

Back in the 1960s, Charlie Richter (PhD '28) installed a seismometer in his living room. It was bigger than his TV set, and it didn't go with the sofa, but it saved him a lot of late-night drives into the Seismo Lab and was a great conversation piece. Now, if you live in the Pasadena area, you can have one, too.

05/10/2012

Caltech Researchers Gain Greater Insight into Earthquake Cycles

Katie Neith

For those who study earthquakes, one major challenge has been trying to understand all the physics of a fault—both during an earthquake and at times of "rest"—in order to know more about how a particular region may behave in the future. Now, researchers at Caltech have developed the first computer model of an earthquake-producing fault segment that reproduces, in a single physical framework, the available observations of both the fault's seismic (fast) and aseismic (slow) behavior.

05/07/2012

Caltech's Kanamori Named Foreign Associate of National Academy of Sciences

Kimm Fesenmaier

Hiroo Kanamori, the John E. and Hazel S. Smits Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus, at Caltech, has been elected one of 21 new foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences. Eighty-four new members were also announced during the 149th annual meeting of the academy in Washington, D.C.

11/29/2011

Moore Foundation Awards $6 Million for Research Leading to Earthquake Early Warning System

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded $6 million to Caltech, UC Berkeley, and University of Washington, Seattle, to create a prototype earthquake early warning system for the Pacific Coast of the United States.

11/14/2011

Caltech Geophysicist Joann Stock Receives KINGDOM Educational Software Grant

Allison Benter

Caltech Seismological Laboratory professor Joann Stock has been awarded a KINGDOM Software educational user license from Seismic Micro-Technology Inc.