06-2018 URI is funded by NSF to deploy ocean-bottom seismometers offshore Kilauea to record aftershocks and lava ocean-entry interaction. It is a collaborative project with the Western Washington University and Rice University.

05-2018 Xueyang and Yang's paper on full-waveform sensitivity kernels of component differentials was published in J. Geophys. Res. (pdf).

04-2018 Dr. Farrokh Sheibani give a seminar on numerical modeling of hydraulic fracturing.

02-2018 Lab alumna, Assist. Prof. Haiying Gao of UMass Amherst, received a prestigious NSF Career Grant.

01-2018 Jiahang Li's paper on passive-source reverse-time migration is published in JGR Solid Earth (pdf). Congratulations!

01-2018 The Lab welcomed visiting Ph.D student Fei DENG from Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration.

12-2017 Xueyang Bao, Nian Wang, Brian Savage, and Aaron Hirsch gave presentations at the Fall AGU meeting in New Orleans on a range of topics (Ontong Java Plateau, attnuation kernels, ZH kernels, Foundering of the lithosphere beneath Tibet, eastern North America, subduction at Papua New Guinea, SAC, North Korea test location and moment tensor).

12-2017 Dr. Xinfu Li and Dr. Lianghui Guo of China University of Geosciences (Beijing) started their visits at the Lab. Welcome!

Oct.-Dec., 2016: The Lab welcomed two new members: Dr. Sam Bell from Brown University as a postdoc and Meng Gong from China Earthquake Administration as a Visiting Ph.D Student .

May, 2016: Ashton Flinders gave an outstanding and entertaining presentation at his Ph.D thesis defense (the first defense at GSO requiring 3D viewing glasses, I think). He has moved to Menlo Park, CA to take a position as the USGS Mendenhall Postdoctoral Fellow. Congratulations!

April, 2016: You can find out how seismic waves are attenuated across the U.S. in Bao et al. (GJI, 2016).

February, 2016: There have been numerous velocity models for the Tibetan plateau. How well do they predict seismic waveforms? The short answer: not so well. See a recent paper by Bao and Shen (JGR-Solid Earth, 2016).

December, 2015: A joint receiver function and surface wave inversion reveals the crustal and upper mantle velocity structure in the northeast Tibetan plateau (Zheng et al., GJI, 2015).

September, 2015: Gao and Shen (SRL, 2015) carried out a preliminary full-wave tomography of the structure from the JdF and Gorda spreading centers and the Cascadia volcanic arc.

April, 2015: Full-wave tomography in the western Pacific reveals a surprising discovery at the Ontong Java Plateau, the largest igneous province formed about 120 million years ago (pdf).

April, 2015: See how seasonal changes in ambient noise sources affect monitoring of variations in crustal properties (pdf).

January, 2015: Drs. Xueyang Bao and Nian Wang joined the Lab as postdoctoral research associates. Welcome!

January, 2015: How accurated are tomographic velocity models? See a validation study by Gao and Shen (pdf).

December, 2014: Find out the cause of a tsunami-like event on the eastern U.S. coast (pdf).

December, 2014: Dr. Jihua Fu return to Beijing after an one-year visit as a scholar in the Lab. Before his return, he presented his work, a prototype strainmeter based on coaxial cable, at the Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco.

June, 2014: Postdoc/Visiting Scientist Position

The Seismolab has an immediate opening for a postdoctoral researcher or visiting scientist position. The successful applicant will develop and apply full-waveform-based tomography and/or earthquake source inversion. The initial appointment is for 2 years, with a possibility of renewal or transition to a more senior researcher position, contingent upon satisfactory performance and funding. The position requires strong computational skills, familiarity with seismic data processing, and a solid background in the solution of inverse problems. To apply, please send a cover letter expressing research interests and experience, a curriculum vitae including a list of publications, and the contact information for three references to: Prof. Yang Shen.

June, 2014: Brian Covellone defended his Ph.D thesis with flying colors. Congratulations!

June, 2014: Ambient-noise tomography of the crustal structure beneath the Northeastern Tibetan plateau by Li and others provides new constraints on the growth of the nothern plateau (pdf).

March, 2014: HPC The new high-performance computation cluster shared between the URI Seismology Lab and Computational Molecular Ecology Lab was up and running! With over 1200 Intel Xeon E5 cpu cores and ~9000 GB of memory, this cluster is the first shared HPC facility at URI and will accelarate research and discovery in seismology and biology.

February, 2014: Using waves extracted from ambient seismic noise in a full-wave tomography, Gao and Shen reveal 3D mantle upwelling and melt generation in the back arc of the Cascadia subduction zone (pdf).

December, 2013: Dr. Jihua Fu of China Earthquake Adminstration joined the Lab as a Visiting Scientist.

September, 2013: Kira Homola joined the Lab as a Ph.D student. Welcome!

September, 2013: Christina King received the Alumni Fellowship for her outstanding work on the recent meteorological tsunami. Congratulations!

August, 2013: A surface-wave tomography model by Li et al. (pdf) sheds new light into the growth of the Tibetan plateau.

July, 2013: The investigation of a tsunami-like event that hit the eastern seaboard by Christina King, Yang Shen and others at GSO drew news coverage.

May, 2013: Haiying Gao accepted an Assistant Professor position at University of Massachusetts Amherst! Congratulations! She will start her new position in September.

April, 2013: Christina King and Yang Shen presented their research at the SSA meeting in Salt Lake City.

March, 2013: Former postdoc Wei Zhang joined the faculty of University of Science and Technology of China. Congratulations!

December, 2012: Brian Covellone's work using ambient noise to image the Ontong Java plateau was in the spotlight.

December, 2012: In a recent BSSA paper, Gao and Shen demonstrate the importance of validating tomographic models (pdf).

December, 2012: Dr. Jianshe Lei of Institute of Crustal Dynamics, China Earthquake Administration joined the Lab as a visiting scientist.

November, 2012: Liping Fan of Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration joined the Lab as a visiting Ph.D student.

November, 2012: Bao and co-workers find that attenuation of Lg waves in the Eastern Tibetan plateau is anisotropic and consistent with the azimuthal anisotropy measured from surface waves (pdf).

October, 2012: Covellone and Savage showed the effects of 3D velocity models on earthquake source studies (pdf).

August, 2012: Jiahang Li joined the Lab as a Ph.D student. Welcome!

August, 2012: Christina King presented her work on OBS time correction at the Chapman conference on the island of Hawaii.

August, 2012: Yang Shen gave invited talks at several institutions in China, including the Second Institute of Oceanography, SOA (Hangzhou), Institute of Earthquake Science, CEA, Institute of Geophysics, CEA (Beijing), and Shanxi Seismological Bureau.

August, 2012: Ren and co-workers present images of upper mantle structure beneath the Carpathian-Pannonian system of Eastern and Central Europe, an area of continental collision (pdf).

August, 2012: Shen et al. developed an improved method to extract very-broadband empirical Green's functions from ambient seismic noise (pdf).

July, 2012: Brian Covellone and Ashton Flinders participated in the COAST (Cascadia Open-Access Seismic Transect) research cruise aboard the R/V Marcus G. Langseth. Christina King went on an Okeanos Explorer cruise mapping submarine canyons.

June, 2012: Ashton Flinders spent three weeks climbing volcanoes in the Volcano Geophysical Field Methods course in Ecuador. Lucky.

May, 2012:Christina King took core samples around the Line Islands onboard the R/V Marcus Langseth.

May, 2012: In a recent EPSL paper, Liang and co-workers show that the mantle beneath the Tibetan plateau is far more complex than people realize (pdf).

April, 2012: Christina King, Haiying Gao and Yang Shen gave presentations at the Cascadia Workshop in Portland, Oregon.

March, 2012: Brian Covellone participated in a research cruise off the Marianas islands.

February, 2012: A paper published in GJI by Wei Zhang and co-authors presents a new finite-difference method to simulate wave propagation in the heterogeneous and anisotropic Earth (pdf).

January, 2012: Haiying Gao received the GeoPRISMS Post-Doctoral Fellowship to develop a comprehensive model of subduction and continental accretion at Cascadia. Congratulations!

December, 2011: Brian Covellone, Ashton Flinders, Haiying Gao, Brian Savage and Xinfu Li attended the Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco.

November, 2011: We welcome Xiang DING of China Earthquake Administration to join the Lab as a visiting scholar.

October, 2011: Bao and others use a Reverse Two-Station Method to determine how seismic waves are attenuated in Tibet (pdf).

Sept., 2011: Ashton Flinders returned from a research cruise in the Arctic Ocean. Only a few degrees from the North Pole!

Sept., 2011: Christina King joined the Lab as a Ph.D student. Welcome!

July, 2011: Yang Shen give a presentation (pdf) at the Chapman Conference on the Galapagos Islands.

June, 2011:Dr. Xinfu Li of China University of Geosciences (Beijing, CUGB) joined the Seismological Lab as a visiting scholar. Welcome! Congratulations to Meng Gong! Meng returned to CUGB, successfully defended his thesis, got merried, and found a job at Heibei Seismological Bureau.

March, 2011: Dr. Haiying Gao joined the Seismolab as a postdoc. Welcome!

February, 2011: Liang and co-workers show evidence that the Indian lithosphere has been broken laterally in the direction perpendicular to the convergence (pdf).

September, 2010: Welcome Ashton Flinders, a Ph.D candidate, to the Lab.

July, 2010: In a recent paper published in Geophysics, Wei Zhang and Shen documented a new way to efficiently and accurately simulate seismic wave propagation in 3D media (pdf).

July, 2010: Shen and scientists from China University of Geosciences (Beijing) and Chinese Academy of Geosciences dismantled the stations in the NETS experiment in the northeast Tibetan plateau.

April, 2010: Shen and Wei Zhang gave a presentation on full-wave ambient noise tomography of the north Cascadia at the SSA meeting in Portland.

December, 2009: Savage, Covellone, W. Zhang, Z. Zhang, and Shen gave presentations at the Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco.

November, 2009: Data from a small array of broadband seismic stations in the northeast Tibetan plateau reveal a sharp change in the crustal thickness north of the Kunlun mountains and a north-dipping structure associated the thrust fault systems. More in a recent EPSL paper (pdf).

May, 2009: Zhigang Zhang received the 2009 Watkins Award from the Graduate School of Oceanography, URI. Congratulations!

December, 2008: Simulations of strong ground motion for the Wenchuan earthquake suggest the need for a localized hazard assessment in places of rough topography that takes the topographic effects into account. More in a recent paper in Science in China (pdf).

November, 2008: Ren and Shen present evidence for a causal relatioship between the delamination of mantle lithosphere and the formation of the north-south trending rift in southeastern Tibet in a JGR paper (pdf).

October, 2008: Dr. Wei Zhang gave an invited seminar at MIT on full 3D finite-frequency tomography at regional scales.

October, 2008: Need more data? A paper by Shen, Zhang, and Zhao shows how to more fully utilize three-component seismic records (pdf).

August, 2008: Finite-frequency P waves depend on S-speed perturbations. This has important implications for seismic tomography. More in a recent GJI paper by Zhang and Shen (pdf and erratum).

May, 2008: Yang Shen, Zhigang Zhang, Xiaofeng Liang, and a team of seismologists from University of Missouri, China University of Geosciences, and China Academy of Geosciences carried out the first deployment of seismic stations in the NorthEast Tibetan plateau Seismic experiment.

April, 2008: Zhigang Zhang gave an invited seminar at MIT on the cross-dependence of P waveforms on shear-wave speed. Yang Shen gave an invited presentation in the special session celebrating the heritage of F. A. Dahlen at the SSA meeting in Santa Fe.

December, 2007: The new supercomputer finally arrived at GSO and was successfully assembled by the group (photos). It will provide the computational power needed for fully 3D finite-frequency tomography.

November, 2007: Dr. Yong Ren gave an invited seminar at MIT on the crustal and mantle structure beneath southeastern Tibet.

October, 2007: A paper by Zhang et al. on the sensitivity kernels of head waves is published in Geophys. J. Int. (download pdf).

September, 2007: Welcome Junjie Liu, Weiwei Tong (Ph.D candidates), Xiaofeng Liang (visiting Ph.D student from Peking Univ.), Brian Covellone (undergraduate research assistant) to the Seismology Lab!

August, 2007: Ting Yang joined Tongji University as a faculty member.

May 18, 2007: Zhigang Zhang is the recipient of 2007 John Knauss Award. Congratulations!

March, 2007: GSO alumna, Dr. Elizabeth Kusel, moved to a postdoctoral researcher position at the Northeastern University.

January, 2007: A paper by T. Yang and Y. Shen on the importance of frequency-dependent crustal correction in seismic tomography appeared in BSSA (download pdf).