Launching New Earthquake Studies

Dr. Srisharan Shreedharan, one of our newest faculty, is shaking things up as he launches his earthquake-science research program. Shreedharan has a background in geoscience and engineering, and his Rock Deformation and Earthquake Mechanics lab here in the Geology Building has grown to feature three different instruments that he and his students employ for rock-deformation experiments.

Shreedharan has been awarded several grants in the past months, putting his lab to work! A highlight is an NSF Geophysics project with a Cornell University colleague exploring elastic wave properties throughout the seismic cycle with experiments on meter-scale faults. In this project, the strain signals observed from the “labquakes” will be used to design machine learning approaches to aid in earthquake forecasting. Furthermore, the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program has awarded Dr. Shreedharan’s group two different awards to study laboratory earthquakes, including with the Wasatch fault zone in mind, while SCEC is funding experiments with implications for southern California faults.

The upcoming years of interdisciplinary research in Shreedharan’s lab will provide new insights into the mechanisms driving seismic activity, ultimately contributing to improved earthquake preparedness and resilience.