Eric Frost Honored by NIUSR

The National Institute for Urban Search and Rescue (NIUSR) recently presented their prestigious Eagle Award for Leadership to Eric Frost, a professor in the department of Geological Sciences.
The bronze NIUSR Eagle Award for leadership is presented annually to individuals or organizations that represent the best of not only preparing, but also participating in emergency preparedness, as well as those who are leaders in the real-world implementation of emergency response procedures.Presenting the award on behalf of NIUSR to Frost was Linton Wells, II, the previous award winner.
Lois Clark McCoy told reporters, "What the Executive Board of NIUSR likes most about Frost is that he keeps a humble mane and doesn’t need or seek fame or glory," said Lois Clark McCoy. "What he and his team do is prepare for and participate in everything from exercises to real-world assistance in disasters of all types."
To say that Frost is a pioneer when it comes to emergency planning and response would be to understate what he has done to not only bring together the resources of SDSU State and first responders, but also in his pursuit to prepare future leaders in the field. As co-director of SDSU's Homeland Security program, Frost is making sure that when the baton of leading during emergencies is transferred, there will be a generation of leaders ready to run with it.Frost can often be found in the SDSU Visualization Center. During the fires of October 2007, the Viz Lab, as students and staff affectionately know it, was a flurry of activity as Frost and other SDSU students and faculty assisted with the real-time transfer of information to emergency responders and the media.
It is the mission of NIUSR to bring together people from all walks of life and all levels of emergency preparedness and response in order to help shape a safer future for the people of the world. Honoring Frost for his efforts to lead during drills and exercises and being on the ground preparing leaders of the future is something that NIUSR is honored to do.

source: SDSUniverse

SEMINAR - Phil Wannamaker

Evolution of Fluid and Deformation Regimes in Extensional and Transpressional Tectonism Revealed Through Electrical Resistivity Structure, with Implications for Seismicity, Gold Occurences and Geothermal Resources

Phil Wannamaker
Energy and Geoscience Institute
University of Utah

Deformation of the continents is heterogeneous and reflects the interplay between force and strength. Variations of crustal strength in both brittle and ductile regimes have fluid variation and thermal contrasts as principal controls. These physical properties and other geochemical fluxes can be mapped according to their electrical conductivity using EM survey methods, mainly magnetotellurics (MT). Such weaknesses in lithospheric deformation can be primary inputs to geodynamic models considering e.g. body forces, and geochemical flows implied from geophysical structure can provide insight to permeability pathways and ore deposition. Conductivity provides a strong complement to seismic velocity as a physical property because, in addition to basic structural geometries, it provides unique information on geochemistry and petrology of the deep crust and upper mantle. These concepts will be exemplified in two large-scale integrative studies. The first is over the actively extensional Great Basin and its transition to the Colorado Plateau through Nevada and Utah. These data are revealing probable mantle upwelling zones with anisotropic melt textures, emplacement of basaltic melts into the lower crust, complex fluid exsolution therefrom, and crustal scale detachment zones overhead some of which feed into recognized geothermal systems. Here we are glimpsing many of the processes operant during the early-middle stages of continental margin development, whether the Great Basin is headed that far or not. The second is across the active transpressional orogen of the New Zealand South Island. In the continuum deformation regime of the central island, MT has imaged a root zone of prograde metamorphism and fluid generation impacting crustal rheology, large-scale deformation, a framework for large earthquakes along the Alpine Fault, and migration of gold-bearing fluids in a globally relevant ore deposits model. In a new companion transect of the Marlborough strike slip fault system to the north, the advancing subduction zone has induced distinct conductivity structures interpreted to reflect deep hydrate breakdown, shear-interconnected fluids in holding zones below the brittle-ductile transition, and fault-fracture meshes above the brittle-ductile due to shallow plate dewatering. MT with its wide data bandwidth has the potential to follow thermal and fluid processes from upper mantle source regions, through deep crustal storage and transformation, to upper crustal deposition and dispersal zones.

SEMINAR - Po Chen

A Unified Approach to Full-3D Waveform Tomography and Seismic Source Inversion

Po Chen
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Columbia University

Seismic hazard analysis depends upon seismology to quantify both the seismic sources that generate seismic waves and the Earth structure through which seismic waves propagate. In this talk, I will present a unified approach for iteratively improving the 3D Earth structure model and seismic source models by solving the elastic/anelastic seismic wave equation using purely numerical methods such as finite-difference. First, I will start with an introduction to the background and motivation, which is primarily focused on ground-motion quantification and prediction. Second, I’ll explain how we can quantify the misfit between model-predicted waveforms and the observed waveforms using time- and frequency-dependent phase-delay and amplitude anomalies and how we can use them to evaluate the quality of a given structural or source model. Third, I will introduce the concept of receiver Green tensor (RGT) and its central role in constructing the partial derivatives needed for near-real-time seismic source parameter inversions and the Fréchet kernels for full-3D waveform tomography. Fourth, I’ll present the results that we have obtained from applying this unified approach to the Los Angeles region. Last, I’ll end my talk with a short discussion of some on-going research and a summary.