I’m a geophysics professor at Oregon State University who has been conducting research in the Cascadia subduction zone since moving here from the USGS in Woods Hole MA in 1987. Since then, in partnership with the USGS and various universities, I have been involved with a series of controlled source imaging projects in Cascadia on land and at sea. In general, each project has been more ambitious than the previous project as instrument capabilities provided by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) has grown. The Cascadia2021 project is by far the most ambitious so far, and was enabled by technical improvements in portable seismometers.
In recent years, I have also worked offshore Chile in places that had recently experienced subduction zone earthquakes with M>8 in order to determine how the geologic structure influenced the distribution of slip on the fault plane during the earthquake. That is knowledge that we hope to transfer to our interpretation of the data from Cascadia2021 so that we can better anticipate what will happen next time the Cascadia subduction ruptures.
Click here for more information on the various aspects of my research.
Notes:
- Controlled source imaging uses man-made seismic sources to image beneath Earth’s surface using data processing techniques analogous to those used in medical imaging.
- IRIS is a consortium of universities that operates a pool of shared seismic instrumentation available for use by members of the consortium as well as an open-access data management and archiving facility.