Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher Emily Schultz will talk about earthquake hazards during a presentation November 27 at the Laboratory's Bradbury Science Museum.
The talk is scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. and is cosponsored by Los Alamos Women in Science. It is open to the public and free of charge.
Schultz, of the Laboratory's Earth and Environmental Sciences Division, will explain why the study of earthquakes in regions of blind thrust faults is critical to evaluating a region's seismic hazard risk. A blind thrust fault occurs where the earthquake-generating fault is deep and does not rupture the Earth's surface.
Schultz will discuss two studies along the La Laja Fault system in Argentina, where a devastating earthquake destroyed 90 percent of San Juan's infrastructure in 1944. Seventeen trenches excavated in the La Laja Fault system in 2005 show that separate portions of the system recorded differing numbers of paleoearthquakes. This information is helping researchers understand the activity on the blind thrust fault and the seismic hazard to regions of blind thrust faults.
The Environmental Sciences Division's seismic hazards geology team uses similar techniques to analyze the paleoearthquake history of the Pajarito fault, located west of the Laboratory.
Investigations of this fault provide evidence that three paleoearthquakes in the last 10,000 years were of similar magnitude to the 1944 San Juan earthquake.
Schultz received her degree in geology from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin in 2002 and now focuses on seismic hazard analysis at the Laboratory. She is the secretary of the Laboratory's Students Association and is a member-at-large for the New Mexico Network of Women in Science and Engineering.
The Bradbury Science Museum is located at 15th Street and Central Avenue in downtown Los Alamos. Museum hours, apart from special events, are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesday through Saturday and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday and Monday.
The Bradbury Science Museum is part of the Community Programs Office.
For more information, contact the Bradbury Science Museum at 665-3339.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and Washington Group International for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.