Earthquakes triggered by seismic waves

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• Professor Emily Brodsky (University of California Santa Cruz)
• Monday 26 January 2015, 17:00-18:00
• Harker Room 1, Department of Earth Sciences.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Jack Wright.

Seismic waves can trigger earthquakes. The phenomenon of dynamic triggering was first established by observing long-range earthquake interactions nearly 20 years ago. Today we have evidence that dynamic triggering plays an important role in determining earthquake timing even for common aftershocks. This ubiquity allows us to use triggering to quantitatively measure the conditions necessary for failure of natural faults. For instance, we have established an empirical relationship between seismicity rate changes and the peak dynamic strain in the triggering wave. This relationship contains information of the distribution of faults stresses. It also presents a form of earthquake rates prediction based on a physical observable, i.e., the amplitude of seismic waves.

Emily Brodsky is a professor and earthquake physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research primarily focuses on identifying the processes that trigger earthquakes and constraining the forces and processes that occur inside a fault zone during slip. These studies require tools from a number of fields including seismology, rheology, hydrogeology and structural geology. Prof. Brodsky earned her A.B. from Harvard in 1995, Ph.D. from Caltech in 2001 and was a 2001 Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the recipient of the inaugural 2005 Charles Richter Early Career award from the Seismological Society of America, the 2008 James Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and is an AGU Fellow. She was selected as a Distinguished Lecturer for the NSF Earthscope program, the Geo-Prisms program and the National Science Board. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) and Incorporated Research Institutes for Seismology (IRIS). She has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles and presented over 75 invited lectures or keynote talks. Her work was been featured in major press outlets such as the BBC , NPR, Time Magazine, NY Times, Nature, Reuters, LA Times and The Wall Street Journal.

This talk is part of the Sedgwick Club talks series.

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• Department of Earth Sciences seminars
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