Earthquake Early Warning and the Hayward Fault

Registration fee: $20 (lunch included)
Details: Wear comfortable walking shoes
Organizer/speaker: Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley/Richard Allen, Director, Berkeley Seismological Laboratory
Sponsored by: Berkeley Seismological Laboratory

NOTE: Start and end times given for field trips are the times when the trips depart from and return to the Marriott Marquis San Francisco. Meet at the 4th Street entrance to walk to BART.

The Berkeley Seismological Laboratory operates one of the oldest seismic networks in the world, and is at the forefront of seismic research, including work on an early warning system for the U.S. Pacific Coast. Hear about the latest research on the West Coast’s seismic hazards, prototype early warning systems – including a mobile phone app – and take a guided tour of one of California’s most dangerous faults, the Hayward Fault, which cuts through the UC Berkeley campus.

Attendees will arrive in downtown Berkeley via BART – the Bay Area’s main commuter network and an important user of the early warning system for the West Coast – and be escorted to the Seismo Lab to hear from director Richard Allen. He will introduce the prototype West Coast warning system, ShakeAlert, now being tested from Seattle to the Mexican border, and his own project, MyShake, to crowdsource shaking information from volunteers’ accelerometer-equipped smartphones. He will also discuss another of his projects, the world’s only underwater seismic network, located off the coast of Washington state at the Cascadia subduction zone. Other seismologists will discuss new tsunami warning systems, projects to monitor micro-earthquakes and landslides and the earthquake dangers from injection wells. Lunch will be followed by a guided tour of the Hayward Fault, which runs through the campus football stadium and has offset nearby streams by many meters, and a look at buildings that use specialized base isolators to survive near-fault shaking.

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