January 10, 2005
UCSC experts to discuss recent earthquake
and tsunami on Wednesday
By Tim Stephens
The Department of Earth Sciences invites the campus community
to a discussion of the recent earthquake and tsunami in South
Asia on Wednesday, January 12, at 12:30 in Room 152, Baskin
Engineering Building.
The event, titled "The Sumatran Tsunami: Cause, Effects,
and Potential for Local Tsunami," will feature research
geophysicist Steven Ward, an expert on tsunamis, and seismologists
Thorne Lay and Susan Schwartz, both professors of Earth sciences
with expertise on the causes and consequences of large earthquakes.
The South Asia disaster began with a magnitude 9.0 earthquake
beneath the sea near Sumatra, triggering a tsunami that swept
through the Indian Ocean and devastated coastal areas in a dozen
countries. Ward has created a computer simulation showing how
the tsunami waves spread out from the site of the earthquake.
His expertise on the subject of tsunamis has led to numerous
media interviews and appearances on local and national television
programs, including Dateline NBC.
Lay, director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary
Physics at UCSC, is an expert on earthquake seismology and the
internal structure of the Earth. He has worked on the development
of rapid analysis capabilities that allow fault geometries and
rupture attributes to be determined very rapidly after an earthquake.
Schwartz, director of UCSC's Keck Seismology Laboratory and
the Center for the Study of Imaging and the Dynamics of the
Earth, is an expert on the use of regional seismic network data
to learn about earthquake movements. Her research interests
include the processes that generate earthquakes at subduction
margins and the use of arrays of sensitive instruments to study
seismogenic zones.
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