Reflecting on the 30th anniversary of Loma Prieta this week, earthquake experts recently shared their perspectives on how the event impacted them, the Bay Area and the research community at large.
The Stanford Natural Gas Initiative hosts the first big data workshop for students and industry leaders on data science techniques for better understanding and managing subsurface resources.
“They didn’t know what the shape of the continent was, whether it had mountains — this wasn’t about glaciology or studying ice sheets. It was really fundamental Earth exploration,” says Dusty Schroeder.
Newly available archival film has revealed the eastern ice shelf of Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is melting faster than previous estimates, suggesting the shelf may collapse sooner than expected.
"Thwaites is one of the fastest-changing, most-potentially unstable glaciers in Antarctica and, as such, understanding it is key for understanding the evolution and potential sea-level contribution of the whole ice sheet," Dustin Schroeder says.
Researchers have explained mysterious slow-moving earthquakes known as slow slip events with the help of computer simulations. The answer, they learned, is in rocks’ pores.
Mark Zoback and Jens‐Erik Lund Snee find that wastewater injection from oil and gas operations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area makes faults much more likely to slip.
Researchers have mapped more than 250 faults and found that the majority of faults underlying the Fort Worth Basin are susceptible to earthquakes, some of which extend under highly populated areas in the Dallas-Fort Worth region.
Maps and globes of the moon, photos of lunar expeditions and a transcript of a conversation between two Apollo 16 astronauts are on display at Stanford’s Branner Earth Sciences Library & Map Collections until mid-August.
Geophysics professor Jenny Suckale has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), for her research to understand the mechanical stability of thawing permafrost.
According to geophysics professor Bill Ellsworth, recent Bay Area earthquakes are on the same fault that caused a 5.8 earthquake in Livermore in the 1980s.
"The general public knows a lot about the actual Moon landing but not much more about its scientific importance," professor Sonia Tikoo-Schantz says in the context of how the Apollo 11 mission has shaped our understanding of the Moon and Earth.
Geophysicists Greg Beroza, Bill Ellsworth and Simon Klemperer comment on recent earthquakes. “We expect more earthquakes in the next 20 years than in the past 20 years,” Klemperer says.
