Skype a Seismologist

I love contributing to the Skype a Scientist program because it gives students an opportunity to get to know a “real scientist”. I am a Professor at Miami University (the one in Ohio) and have been on the faculty here since 2005. It is a great place to work because I get to both teach and do science, two of my favorite things.

I have had a chance to Skype with all kinds of people to talk about my science, and I have even used it to be on TV to talk about earthquakes.

I like to talk to people about what happens during an earthquake, and one of the key things to learn is that earthquakes create seismic waves that cause the ground to shake. It's sort of like how dropping a rock in a pond will cause ripples to spread out across the surface. This animation shows exaggerated recordings of how the earth moves up and down across the United States in response to an earthquake on the West Coast.

It's also important to understand why earthquakes happen. This video explains the process of "elastic rebound". Rocks along the sides of a fault are being pushed in different directions by plate tectonics. The two sides have a hard time moving past each other because of friction, and the rocks bend for many years until the stress gets too big and they snap back to their original shape. The snap is the earthquake.

This video shows a zoomed in view of how friction on the fault works. The jagged edges of the rocks on either sides get caught on each other until the stress gets big enough to pull the sides apart and then they can slip past each other in an earthquake.

But earthquakes are the only thing that causes the Earth to shake - People do too! This video shows how Ohio State fans cause the stadium and the ground around it to shake when they jump up and down for an exciting football play.

We can measure the shaking using a seismometer. This video shows a slice through the Earth so you can see how a seismometer records the seismic waves that come from an earthquake.

There are seismometers all over the world to better identify where, when, and how big earthquakes are. This animation shows all of the recorded earthquakes over the last 15 years.

One of the things I have been working on lately is a way to better detect the small earthquakes. I'm hoping that we can use fast computers to help us see if there are patterns in the small earthquakes that might tell us when a big earthquake is more likely.

I hope this gave you a good introduction to earthquakes and seismic waves and I hope you will be interested to talk to me about it on Skype!