Detecting earthquakes before they happen

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>> Richard Allen: I'm Richard Allen, I'm a professor here at UC Berkeley, and I'm researching how we can use real-time seismic data to detect and assess the hazard associated with earthquakes.

Music I grew up in the UK, where there really aren't any earthquakes. The reason I became interested in earthquakes was a roundabout route. First of all, I was interested in earth structure, and then once I understood earth structure, I started studying earthquakes. One of the research projects I'm working on is called Elams assumed spelling. It's developing a methodology to use real-time seismic data to detect earthquakes and assess the shaking hazard, and then provide warnings to people before they actually feel the shaking. We've learned that we can rapidly detect the earthquakes, and assess the hazard with a fair amount of certainty, enough that we think we can start to provide people warnings with accuracy that they can take action, knowing that it's the right time to take action. Another project that we're working on at the seismic lab is putting out seismic instrumentation on the ocean floor. One of the problems we have is that all of our seismic stations are on shore, while the faults in California, many of the faults are very close to the coastline. So if we want to get really good data to understand these faulting processes, we need to have instruments off shore. Right now, we have a test station that is running in real time in the Monterrey Bay. It's on the end of an eight kilometer cable that runs down into the bay, and streams the data from that ocean bottom seismometer back to us here at the Berkeley seismic lab. I find earthquakes really fascinating because of the motion associated with them. We think of the earth as being a stationary, stable place, but it's not. And the way that it moves is through these dramatic, rapid earthquake processes.

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