Distinguished Lecturer Stein to discuss how to live with giant earthquakes

“A talk not to be missed”, says Professor Mark Cloos in the Jackson School's Department of Geological Sciences.

Background: On December 26, 2004 the world saw yet again the incredible power of giant earthquakes. An area of rock under the Indian Ocean, about the size of the state of California, shifted by 30 feet. This shift generated a massive sea wave that crossed the Indian Ocean in a few hours, wreaking destruction along seacoasts and causing at least 300,000 deaths. The energy released was far greater than the largest nuclear weapons.

December's earthquake was one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded. Such giant earthquakes have happened before: 100 years ago much of San Francisco was destroyed by an earthquake far smaller than the Indian Ocean one. They will happen again. Seismologists are working to understand the physics of such earthquakes and learn how to live with them.

In fact, we can't live without them. This is because giant earthquakes are part of plate tectonics, the process that keeps our planet and us alive. They occur primarily at the boundaries between the great plates that make up earth's outer shell. Heat from inside the earth makes plates move—at about the speed fingernails grow—while their boundaries are locked. Every few hundred years, the motion on part of a boundary is released in a giant earthquake. This destruction is the price we pay for plate tectonics, which also keeps us alive. Plate tectonics also creates volcanoes, which replenish the atmosphere we breathe and keeps the earth warm enough for us to live on. The processes of plate tectonics provided the conditions needed for life to evolve and survive.

We haven't learned to predict when giant earthquakes will happen. Thus the best we can do is build our societies to minimize the damage from earthquakes. This can be done by earthquake resistant construction, systems to warn of imminent tsunami waves, and other measures. Deciding how to do this is a challenging and important task.

Dr. Seth Stein is a professor at Northwestern University. His research interests are in earthquake seismology, plate tectonics, and space geodesy. Much of his research focuses on how plate tectonics works and how it causes earthquakes. He was one of the developers of a global model showing how fast plates move, which is crucial to understanding where and when large earthquakes occur. He has also been involved with testing such models using the Global Positioning System satellites, which can see motions in a few years rather than over millions of years. Beyond purely scientific issues, he is interested in questions of formulating public policy to mitigate earthquake hazards and has worked extensively with news media to improve public understanding of earth science.

Professor Stein was one of the organizers of EarthScope, a new national initiative to dramatically advance our knowledge of the structure and evolution of North America. He served as Scientific Director of UNAVCO, the consortium of universities using GPS for earth science, and been Visiting Senior Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He has also been active in earth science education. He is a coauthor of a widely used seismology textbook, started Northwestern's Environmental Science program, and published papers on teaching methods. He has advised many Ph.D. students, four of which have received outstanding paper awards from the American Geophysical Union.

For more information contact J.B. Bird at the Jackson School, jbird@jsg.utexas.edu, 512-232-9623.

* IRIS/SSA stands for Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Seismological Society of America (SSA), joint sponsors of Stein's lectureship.