Mendenhall Postdoctoral Researcher

United States Geological Survey (USGS)

kksmith7@alaska.edu


About Me

Yá'át'ééh (Hello in Navajo)!

I was born and raised in the Colorado Plateau but went to Alaska to get my PhD in  Geophysics in the field of seismology.  Now I am doing a postdoc in Taiwan studying landslides. Although I have many interests, you can call me a seismologist.  A seismologists is a scientist that studies earthquakes and other motions within the earth. A lot of my time is dedicated to the study of sedimentary basins, landslides, seismic noise, machine learning and scientific communication.

Education

University of Alaska Fairbanks, PhD in Geophysics,  2014–2020

New Mexico Tech, MS Mathematics with Specialization in Operations Research and Statistics, 2012–2014

New Mexico Tech, BS Mathematics, 2008–2012

Research Interests

Environmental seismology, sedimentary basins, landslides, machine learning and moment tensor inversion

Selected Publications

Smith, K., C. Tape and V. C. Tsai (2022), Seismic response of Nenana sedimentary basin, central Alaska, Bull. Seismol. Soc. Am., doi:10.1785/0120220160.

Smith, K., and C. Tape (2020), Seismic response of Cook Inlet sedimentary basin, southern Alaska, Seismol. Res. Lett., doi:10.1785/0220190205

Smith, K., and C. Tape (2019), Seismic noise in central Alaska and influences from rivers, wind, and sedimentary basins, J. Geophys. Res. Solid Earth, doi:10.1029/2019JB017695

Tape, C., Holtkamp, S., Silwal, V., Hawthorne, J., Kaneko, Y., Ampuero, J. P., Ji, C., Ruppert, N., Smith, K., and West, M. E. (2018), Earthquake nucleation and fault slip complexity in the lower crust of central Alaska, Nature Geoscience, 11, 536–541, doi:10.1038/s41561-018-0144-2

Tape, C., D. Christensen, M. M. Moore-Driskell, J. Sweet, and K. Smith (2017), Southern Alaska Lithosphere and Mantle Observation Network (SALMON): a seismic experiment covering the active arc by road, boat, plane, and helicopter, Seismol. Res. Lett., 88(4), 1185–1202, doi:10.1785/0220160229