Free Coulomb 3.0 Short Courses on Dec 8 and Dec 15, at the USGS in Menlo Park

Coulomb is designed to investigate Coulomb stress changes on faults, dikes, and earthquake nodal planes, and is intended for publication-directed research and university teaching and instruction.

The program, user guide, and tutorial files are freely available from:

Taught by Ross Stein (USGS), Shinji Toda (AIST), Jian Lin (WHOI), and Volkan Sevilgen (USGS), this free, full-day, course is guaranteed to turn novices into mavens. You don’t have to take the class to use Coulomb, but you will learn faster with us. You will use your own laptop also receive a bound User Guide. We have room for only 50 people.

To register for the course, contact vsevilgen@usgs.gov (650 329 4803); your place is reserved if you get a confirmation email. Coulomb runs on Mac’s (PowerPC or Intel), Windows PCs, and Linux. Coulomb is a MATLAB application, so you’ll need to install MATLAB 7.X before arriving.

Why Coulomb?

We believe that people learn best when they can see the most and can explore alternatives quickly. So the principal feature of Coulomb is ease of input, rapid interactive modification, and intuitive visualization of the results. Coulomb calculates displacements, strains, and stresses caused by fault slip, magmatic intrusion or dike expansion. Problems such as how an earthquake promotes or inhibits failure on nearby faults, or how fault slip or dike expansion will compress a nearby magma chamber, are germane to Coulomb. Geologic deformation associated with strike-slip faults, normal faults, or fault-bend folds is also a useful application. Calculations are made in an elastic halfspace with uniform isotropic elastic properties following Okada (1992). The internal graphics are suitable for publication, and can be imported into illustration or animation programs for enhancements.

Course Structure

In the morning, we’ll first introduce you to Coulomb analysis and explain our approach to modeling through a series of animations and slides. Then you'll learn how to build and use input files, add active fault, earthquake catalog, and coastline overlays. Then we'll calculate displacements and strains and create publication-quality PDF and numerical output files. We’ll also show you how to taper or tile the fault slip, and how Coulomb can read the leading database of variable-slip source models. In the afternoon, we’ll focus on Coulomb stress analysis for seismic and volcanic investigations, and show you how to display your results in Google Earth. You'll resolve stress changes on faults in their rake directions, on specified rakes, or on optimal planes. You’ll learn how to view all these results graphically in 3D and output numerical tables. With five instructors, there will be plenty of individual attention, and no one will be left behind.

Course Logistics

The USGS campus is 50 minutes south of San Francisco by car, or 1 hr by train. Take the 8:00 AM train (#442) from the San Francisco station (4th St and Townsend). We will pick people up at the Menlo Park train station. The course runs from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. A catered lunch and refreshments that will cost you $15 will be served.