Gareth Funning, Associate Professor at U.C. Riverside, presents "What can we learn from 25 years of earthquakes studied with InSAR?"

ABSTRACT:
Since the Landers earthquake was captured by the ERS-1 satellite in 1992, over 150 earthquakes have been observed using InSAR. As an alternative method to seismology, InSAR has some benefits for studying earthquakes: since it directly measures the displacement of the ground, we can obtain accurate, ground-truthed locations for each event. We can also in many cases estimate the fault length and surface slip directly from the data. 

To exploit these strengths, we have compiled the results of more than 200 published studies of over 100 individual earthquakes, in the magnitude range M4.9–9.0, into an InSAR Centroid Moment Tensor (ICMT) catalogue. I will show how the location information from InSAR has potential for evaluating and correcting Earth seismic velocity models, and also how we can use the information on fault dimensions to develop alternatives to the existing earthquake scaling relationships used to estimate seismic hazard.

ASSUMED PRIOR: General geophysical principles.

MIT Earth Resources Laboratory's FISH (Friday Informal Seminar Series) takes place most Fridays while classes are in session, usually 12-1pm in 54-209.  When a FISH talk is scheduled, info will be posted on our website about a week prior.  To be added to our e-mail announcement list, please contact erl-info@mit.edu.