22 April 2024–Recipients of the first SSA Community Grants of 2024 will support students attending a training workshop on volcano and rift seismicity in East Africa and help organize a popular annual seismology workshop for students. Suzan van der Lee of Northwestern University and Emily Brodsky of the University of California, Santa Cruz were awarded $5,000 to support postdoctoral students attending a week-long workshop for training in select seismological analysis and for cogeneration of ideas for extended routine operations and/or research towards additional characterization and understandi ..read more

16 April 2024–Tina Dura has always been interested in the natural world—from volcanoes to weather to “learning more about why the landscape looked the way it did,” she recalled. But the fieldwork she does as a paleoseismologist would not have appealed to her as a child. “It’s funny to me that I was afraid of camping, thinking that wild animals were going to attack the tent. And now I camp and do fieldwork in remote places all the time!” Dura, an assistant professor in the geosciences department at Virginia Tech, works in coastal paleoseismology, using everything from sedimentology to stratigra ..read more

1 April 2024— Five student and early-career members will receive travel grants to participate in scientific conferences as part of the Global Travel Grants program, which provides financial support to SSA members.  The competitive program received 22 quality applications this cycle. Sergio Leon-Rios (Advanced Mining Technology Center – Universidad de Chile) will attend the Latin American and Caribbean Seismological Commission in San José, Costa Rica. Shikha Sharma (Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, India)  will travel to Milan, Italy to take part in the 18th World Conferen ..read more

13 March 2024–Seattle may have experienced its own Swift Quake last July, but at an August 2023 concert Taylor Swift’s fans in Los Angeles gave scientists a lot of shaking to ponder. After some debate, a research team led by Gabrielle Tepp of Caltech concluded that it was likely the dancing and jumping motions of the audience at SoFi Stadium—not the musical beats or reverberations of the sound system—that generated the concert’s distinct harmonic tremors. In their study in Seismological Research Letters, Tepp and colleagues show how they were able to identify the seismic signature of individua ..read more

12 March 2024–Earthquakes were part of Luis Donoso Carmona’s environment “for as long as I can remember,” growing up in northern Chile in the small city of Vallenar in the Atacama Desert, he said. His great-grandmother told stories of the destroyed ports and railway lines and overturned locomotives she had seen after the Great Atacama Earthquake (magnitude 8.6) in 1922. “With that environment, it didn’t take me much to decide to try to understand what this giant was that shook houses and destroyed cities when it woke up,” Donoso said. He studied geophysics at university, aiding seismologists w ..read more

28 February 2024–An increasing number of seismologists are using fiber optic cables to detect seismic waves on Earth—but how would this technology fare on the Moon, and what would it tell us about the deep layers of our nearest neighbor in space? In Seismological Research Letters, Wenbo Wu of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and colleagues explore the idea of deploying a fiber seismic network on the Moon, discussing some of the challenges to overcome. They also test this hypothetical network using artificial seismograms created from data collected by seismometers placed on the Moon’s surface ..read more

21 February 2024–Strange seismic wave arrivals from a 2010 earthquake under Spain were the clues that led to an unexpected discovery beneath the western Mediterranean: a subducted oceanic slab that has completely overturned. The waveforms paint a picture of a slab that descended rapidly into the Earth’s mantle and flipped over, so that the water it carried on its surface as it descended is now beneath the slab, according to the study published in The Seismic Record. The findings could help researchers sort out the complicated tectonic structure of the western Mediterranean basin where Africa a ..read more

15 February 2024–A new measure that compares earthquake-related fatalities to a country’s population size concludes that Ecuador, Lebanon, Haiti, Turkmenistan, Iran and Portugal have experienced the greatest impact from fatalities in the past five centuries. The new impact measure, introduced in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America by Max Wyss and colleagues at International Centre for Earth Simulation Foundation, is called the earthquake fatality load or EQFL. The EQFL of a particular earthquake is the ratio of earthquake fatalities to the population estimate for the country i ..read more

13 February 2024–Oceans cover about 70% of the Earth’s surface—a fact that draws HyeJeong Kim’s scientific gaze under the sea, even as the seismologist now works on dry land as a postdoc at the University of Utah. “If you don’t have seismic stations under that massive water, it’s limiting our understanding for 70% of the surface of the planet we are living on,” said Kim, explaining her love of ocean bottom seismometers (OBS). Conducting seismology research with OBS in the depths comes with unique challenges, she said, including a shorter length of time for data collection, difficulties in fixi ..read more

23 January 2024–SSA is pleased to announce the recipients of several of the Society’s awards for 2024. The Harry Fielding Reid Medal, the Charles F. Richter Early Career Award, the Frank Press Public Service Award and the SSA Distinguished Service Award are among the highest honors conferred by the Society. 2024 Harry Fielding Reid Medal: Norman A. Abrahamson Abrahamson, adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Davis, and former engineering seismologist at Pacific Gas & Electric Co, receives the 2024 Re ..read more