September 8 - Leonardo Guzman: title TBA. Host Oliver Boyd. USGS sponsored speaker.
Abstract
The Central United States (CUS) hosts two of the major seismic zones east of the Rockies: the New Madrid and Wabash Valley Seismic Zones. Over the past 4500 years the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) has repeatedly produced sequences of large magnitude (M>7) earthquakes. The 1811-1812 NMSZ winter events were the largest intraplate sequence historically recorded in the United States and produced great devastation in the epicentral region, which fortunately at that time was scarcely populated. Even though the seismicity in the 1800’s was dominated by the NMSZ activity, magnitude 5 and larger earthquakes in the last 150 years have occurred in the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone (WVSZ) (Bakun and Hopper, 2004). The population density and development of this area has drastically changed from that of the early nineteenth century, and a big earthquake would put at risk the population and infrastructure within the country’s heartland. In this study we present two earthquake scenarios that induce large ground motions in populated areas within the Mississippi embayment and other areas within the CUS. The hypothetical scenarios are ruptures taking place in the WVSZ and the southern arm of the NMSZ. Our synthetic ground motions are calculated to a maximum frequency of 1.0 Hz using the Hercules finite element tool-chain (Tu et al., 2006) and a recently developed velocity model of the region (CUSVM1). Our simulations use a minimum shear-wave velocity of 350 m/s and cover a 700 km x 700 km domain which includes Memphis and St. Louis.
September 24 - Doug Wiens: “Antarctic Seismology: constraints on the history and dynamics of an ice-covered continent”. Host Beatrice Magnani
October 1 – Suzan van der Lee: title TBA. Host Beatrice Magnani
October 8 – Samantha Hansen: "Connecting the African Superplume to Rifting in East Africa and Western Arabia using Adaptively Parameterized P-wave Tomography." Host Heather DeShon
All seminars are held in the Seminar Room in the CERI Graduate Building at 3pm unless otherwise specified.