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Earthquakes at the USGS: Fifty Years of Blowing the Lid off Seismic Science

This talk was presented by Ross Stein, representing the Earthquake Hazards Team in Menlo Park as part of the 50th anniversary of the USGS campus in Menlo Park in 2005. The talk was given in Menlo Park and Reston. In PowerPoint presenter mode, you can see speaking notes. There are several embedded animations and one audio file. The slides are simple to understand and feature photographs of many of the Teams great scientists, past and present. The talk is intended for the public, or for undergraduates who are not necessarily geology majors.

The slide sequence highlights the accomplishments of the Team in establishing the northern California seismic network and the Parkfield earthquake experiment; in breaking ground in paleoseismology, seismic engineering, real-time alert systems, earthquake geodesy, historical earthquake relocation, the double-difference method, stress triggering, laboratory rock mechanics, and deep fault drilling. The talk closes by touching on the hard-won birth of the earthquake program in the United States, the special role the USGS plays with the public during earthquake crises, and our debt to Robert E. Wallace.

Stress triggering slides

This set of 43 slides begins with a 3-slide sequence explaining Coulomb stress change and its components. You can follow these with the Flash animations on our website, 'grid_1sq.swf' and 'grid.swf', which illustrate this very intuitively.

Next in 8 slides, we show the calculated Coulomb stress changes for 5 southern California M≥6 shocks from Toda et al (JGR, 2005). If you go to the download site for this paper, you will find 3 great Flash animations that show how the stress changes can be combined with the concept of rate and state friction to produce expected seismicity maps.

Next we show how the seismicity rate plummeted in the SF Bay area after the 1906 EQ, and suggest how this can be explained by the faults falling under the Coulomb stress shadow of that great earthquake, and also show how and where the Bay area is emerging from the shadow today.

Then we show how stress transferred by the 1983 Coalinga earthquake might have delayed the Parkfield shock, and how it accelerated seismicity and creep on the creeping section. Then we show how the southern San Andreas may control the occurrence of thrust and strike-slip earthquakes on either side of the San Andreas, from Lin & Stein (2004).

Finally, we show expected and observed stress changes and seismicity for thrust and reverse events, including some of the largest subduction events ever recorded. This work is also from Lin & Stein (2004).

Our Ever Changing Earth

This Scientific American 'Special Edition' volume contains 12 beautifully written and illustrated articles. Because they are professionally edited, they are much more readable than what else you'll read from these authors. They would be great for college geology or geophysics classes. And you can make slides from the downloadable version of the book.

Articles are written by Claude Allègre and Stephen Schneider, Ian Dalziel, Roger Larson, Gary Glatzmaier and Peter Olson, Raymond Jeanloz and Thorne Lay, Ross Taylor and Scott McLennan, Lincoln Pratson and William Haxby, Michael Gurnis, Enrico Bonatti, Nicholas Pinter and Mark Brandon, Peter Cervelli, Harry Green II, and Ross Stein.

This special edition volume can be accessed online from Scientific American website
The article written by Ross Stein, Earthquake Conversations is also available from our website.