NSF AC GEO Report on Portfolio Review of EAR Seismology and Geodesy Instrumentation Completed

In April 2021, we finished a fairly intensive project: AC GEO Report on Portfolio Review of EAR Seismology and Geodesy Instrumentation. I defer to that page as the official one, but I wanted to put a note here as well.

I was the chair of the committee, and the citation is

Arrowsmith, J R., Brodsky, E. E., Cooper, C. M., Elliott, J. L., Fee, D., Fischer, K.M., Hammond, W. C., La Femina, P., Lekic, V., Wang, H., and Worthington, L. L., Recommendations for Enabling Earth Science Through NSF’s Geophysical Facility – A Portfolio Review of EAR Seismology and Geodesy Instrumentation, Report to the US National Science Foundation, April 2021.

But, I want to really highlight the efforts of the entire committee! This was a really strong group that worked hard and respectfully together to come up with something we are quite proud of. It has some depth which I hope will give it shelf life.

Here are the rest of the Acknowledgements:
Thank you to UNAVCO President Rebecca Bendick and Director of Geodetic Infrastructure Glen Mattioli as well as IRIS President Robert Woodward and Portable Programs Manager Kent Anderson for their rapid and thorough responses to the committee queries. Christopher Crosby (UNAVCO) provided input on geodetic imaging. Jonathan Ajo-Franklin (Rice University), Kent Anderson (IRIS), Jnaneshwar Das (Arizona State University), Rob Evans (WHOI), W. Steven Holbrook (Virginia Tech), and Glen S. Mattioli (UNAVCO) kindly made themselves available for interviews with the committee. We are grateful to Lindsay M. Martin who supported the committee very ably as science assistant from the National Science Foundation. Finally, many thanks to Margaret Benoit (National Science Foundation Program Director) for her careful guidance.

Some new San Andreas Fault tour videos of 1 m bare earth hillshades

I have been preparing a lecture and I built some new simple videos flying along the San Andreas Fault. The videos are made by me flying along in Google Earth with 1 m hillshades produced from lidar topography data collected along the San Andreas Fault. The videos are on youtube in this play list: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFfZSFyNZ_jZm86F1TsnYfuuYNef_Uh21. I also put the MP4s in this folder--they are numbered 1-8 from NW-SE.

The flights follow generally along the San Andreas Fault from Point Arena to the southern Carrizo Plain (Dragon's Back and Northern Elkhorn Hills):

The data were processed at www.opentopography.org and come from 3 really cool datasets:

• EarthScope Northern California Lidar Project. Data collected by National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping.
• B4 project: southern San Andreas Fault laser scan. Data collected by National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping in collaboration with USGS, UNAVCO, and Ohio State University.
• Dragons Back Ridge: San Andreas Fault, California acquisition. Data collected by National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping in collaboration with George Hilley.

Short Course just completed: Imaging and Analyzing Southern California's Active Faults with High Resolution Topography

We just completed our most recent OpenTopography short course: Imaging and Analyzing Southern California's Active Faults with High Resolution Topography. The course was sponsored by The Southern California Earthquake Center, UNAVCO, EarthScope, and OpenTopography. It was a pleasure to work again Chris Crosby and Ed Nissen and many thanks to Alana Williams (along with Jessica Sutton, Barrett Salisbury, and Gayatri Marliyani) for the local logistical support.

Nice montage put together by Barrett Salisbury for the course advertisement.

We had 90 applications for just 34 slots, so we emphasized early career scientists (mostly graduate students), and research in Southern California given SCEC's sponsorship. We hope to run another course soon (April 2016?) to catch up a bit more with the demand. It was wonderful to meet new people and share our enthusiasm for high resolution topography!

Students hard at work in the computer lab--Ed Nissen at the controls.

New: We recorded some of the talks. I made a summary playlist of my talk as a test. The audio is not great, but it is a summary motivation for the meeting: Sharpening our view of earth processes with high resolution topography

Summary write up for EarthScope newsletter but of relevance here too:

High resolution topographic data has become an important tool for earthquake scientists to make detailed observations and model surface evolution. Within the last decade, several efforts have been made to collect high resolution topographic (HRT) data for active faults (e.g. The B4 project, EarthScope, and numerous National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping--NCALM and USGS projects). These datasets are freely available online through OpenTopography, a NSF funded data distribution portal. The active faulting community has taken great interest in these exciting datasets, using them to generate new and important insights into earthquake processes in Southern California and elsewhere.

The EarthScope program supported the acquisition of several thousand square km of high resolution topography from lidar along active faults of the western US. The target areas included Northern, Southern & Eastern California (everything not already covered by the B4 project along the San Jacinto fault and southern San Andreas Fault; Prentice, et al., 2009), Yakima (Washington), Alaska (portions of the Denali rupture and Totschunda fault--see figure), and the Intermountain Seismic Belt (portions of the Wasatch Fault and Yellowstone). These data have been invaluable for studying deformation processes in a complementary mode to the fault zone drilling, geodetic, and seismological observatories of EarthScope.

Reference:
Prentice, C. S., Crosby, C. J., Whitehill, C. S., Arrowsmith, J R., Furlong, K. P., Phillips, D. A., GeoEarthScope LiDAR illuminates northern California's active faults, EOS Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, v. 90, no. 7, p. 55, 2009.

AGU 2014 and EarthScope Town Hall

The American Geophysical Union Fall 2014 meeting came and went. It is quite a taxing meeting. But, I saw some old friends and many colleagues. A highlight was running the EarthScope Town Hall. Our agenda was:

• EarthScope overview, science achievements, and status (Arrowsmith)
• Update from the National Science Foundation (Benoit)
• Plate Boundary Observatory Futures workshop report (James Foster)
• IRIS Science workshop report and Transportable Array update (Central Eastern US network and Alaska deployments; Bob Detrick)
• Upcoming meetings overview (Arrowsmith)
• Questions and discussion

Here is a copy of my talk (includes the presentations of Foster and Detrick): ppt and pdf. We did not get a lot of discussion but there were about 70 people in attendance and it seemed as if it were useful.

We also had our EarthScope Booth which was very well managed by our team (Cindy Dick, Sarah Robinson, and guest booth host Jeff Lockridge). Thanks to them for their hard work and all who stopped by. Steve Semken and I were running around with busy schedules but we enjoyed our EarthScope interactions. We also had a couple of EarthScope Education and Outreach posters lead by Sarah Robinson, Steve Semken, Wendy Bohon, and Kathy Ellins.

Fall 2014 Workshop on the Future of the Amphibious Array

Led by Professor Geoff Abers (speaking above), we organized the Workshop on the Future of the Amphibious Array which was held at Snowbird in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah--and which I remember well from early EarthScope meetings.

The workshop charge was to make the case for further amphibious experiments (emphasizing the idea of crossing the shoreline). We need to articulate the case for integrated amphibious science. And, we were to evaluate the Cascadia experience. We were guided by the EarthScope Science Plan and by the GeoPrisms planning documents. I also helped summarize a breakout session. Here is the PPT.

Greg Anderson from NSF was traveling with Silverwing:

I had a decent view of the Grand Canyon on the way home:

GSA Annual Meeting 2014

I spent almost a week in Vancouver, CA for the Geological Society of America Annual meeting. It is a very beautiful city with dramatic views and great food.

--view from the convention center

Becky Flowers giving science motivation talk at the EarthScope Geochronology and the Earth Sciences Institute and short course. The short course was my main purpose for being there as I helped to organize it. I learned a lot. For example, a date is an outcome of the analysis and calculation, while age is an interpretation (S. Bowring). I gave a welcome (PPT) and an EarthScope science motivation talk (PPT).We kicked off the Gecchronology student award program: PPT. We have a number of videos of the presentations and the pdfs, etc. which should be on line soon.

I also enjoyed seeing many old friends and colleagues.

24 August 2014 M6 Earthquake northern San Francisco Bay area (6km NW of American Canyon, California)

An M6 strike-slip earthquake occurred in the northern San Francisco Bay area last night (3:20 am local time). It is reported as 6 km NW of American Canyon and between Napa and Vallejo. This is the biggest event in the Bay Area since the 1989 M6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake. Aftershocks are following and will continue. Not a lot of additional data and interpretation are yet available, but they will be soon! There might be some surface rupture, and there should be coherent ground cracking (could end up being a semantic point!). There will be a lot of landslides, and there seems to be structure damage in especially some of the older brick buildings in the region. It sounds like people have been injured from falling debris. I hope everyone will be ok. The Did You Feel It mapping shows that shaking was very strong to severe in the north Bay area and it was felt widely across the region.

The UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory and the Southern California Earthquake Center Data Center (link) have nice maps and lists showing the location of the main shock and the aftershocks elongate along the rupture zone. There is some useful commentary about the faults and their recent activity at the bottom of the main Main USGS page on the event.

The earthquake occurred in the area of the West Napa Fault. The focal mechanism is consistent with the expected right lateral slip. I made the figure using the USGS Quaternary Faults data base and the focal mechanism from the USGS. The center of the focal mechanism is on the epicenter.

Here is a kmz of the hillshaded digital elevation model (Napa watershed gathered by National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping in 2003) at 2 m resolution of the area of the main shock (click to download the kmz):

I georeferenced one of the maps from the Wesling and Hanson final technical report (click to download the kmz). Lineaments are targets for field survey:

Here is folder with georeferenced images.

I notice a Plate Boundary Observatory station not far from the southern end of the likely rupture zone (P261), but no updates yet for today to see a change in its position. There are also borehole strainmeters that apparently felt the squeeze.

Here are a few links:

• USGS Press release (8/25/2014)
• Main USGS page on the event
• IRIS Teachable Moment
• How earthquake affected sleep from Jawbone Up
• UC Berkeley Seismo lab Seismo blog
• EERI clearing house
• California Earthquake Clearinghouse event site
• Danny Stockli pointed out this recent publication and mapping on the West Napa Fault: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/external/reports/05HQAG0002.pdf

Short Course at LIPI : Techniques in Active Tectonic Study

In July 2013, Gayatri Marliyani and I taught a short course at LIPI in Bandung, Indonesia on Techniques in Active Tectonic study. I put together almost 30 lectures on various topics in active tectonics, neotectonics, tectonic geomorphology, paleoseismology, earthquake geology, and related topics. Special thanks to Mudrik Daryono (course coordinator for LIPI/ITB/GREAT), Irwan Meilano (ITB/GREAT), Danny Hilman Natawidjaja (LIPI/GREAT), Eko Yulianto (LIPI/GREAT), and the participants.

Gayatri built a nice website with all of the freely available lectures and other course content. We also recorded most of the lectures and they are on youtube.

The course web site is: http://activetectonics.la.asu.edu/lipi/. Look under the schedule link for the lectures and the link for some exercise content.

Group picture on field trip along the Lembang Fault.

EarthScope is the #1 Most Epic Project on Popular Science Website!

(from the PopSci web site)

It is very cool that EarthScope has been selected as the #1 most epic science project at Popular Science Magazine/Website. They have an article in the August 2011 issue entitled:  Big Science: The Universe's Ten Most Epic Projects.  It is impressive to have that rating against some other big and exciting science projects, including the Large Hadron Collider and the International Space Station. They used some quantitative ratings and also some qualitative ones such as: What's in it for me? Wow factor, and Scientific Utility on all of which it received a 10. I think that the sense of EarthScope's practicality and its cost to size (variably measured) ratio help boost it. The write up is nice and generally gets the high points given its brevity.

This kind of coverage is really helpful for a program such as EarthScope in terms of visibility. It is the only earth science activity on the list (there is Neptune--ocean science observatory). We can put a lot of energy into outreach, but the readership of something like PopSci will simply dwarf anything we might do...

Since May, we (Matt Fouch, Ed Garnero, Steve Semken, Wendy Taylor, and I) have been leading the EarthScope National Office and I have been the Chair of the EarthScope Steering Committee, so this is very good news and due to the efforts of the prior ESNO staff at Oregon State University.