Good afternoon. My name is Mike Oskin.
Along with Tran Huynh, we’re representing SCEC on this
earthquake response panel today. This is a presentation that many of you
have probably seen versions of at the SCEC meeting in the past
just summarizing SCEC’s role in earthquake response planning.
So SCEC does have a post-earthquake rapid response scientific mission.
We collaborate with state and federal agencies that have the statutory
responsibilities to respond to earthquakes, and our goal is that,
by working together, the SCEC community, which involves academic,
industry, and the federal and state agencies, we can achieve a more
effective rapid scientific response to earthquakes.
So what SCEC does is provide some intellectual leadership
spanning the breadth of earthquake system science, from the observations
to the modeling, for example, to the outcomes.
Coordination of the response, particularly with the academic
science community. And contributing to the communication of knowledge
to the world at large. So it’s really important that SCEC is coordinating
with agencies so that we align our earthquake response science goals,
that we integrate the structured leadership and planning that agencies
like the USGS undertake, with guiding what is really
an emergent open collaboration that forms among the
SCEC community during earthquake response.
It’s essential that we ensure open real-time collaboration and
data sharing between all entities involved and that we have
a managed coordinated and uncoordinated media outreach.
SCEC is also involved in securing financial support for immediate
response activities through generating proposals and planning and leading
and funding for post-earthquake experiments and practicing
for future earthquakes.
So what are the science questions that drive our earthquake response mission?
Well, one is, how does an earthquake sequence unfold,
leading to the nucleation of a large aftershock or even a larger event,
say like what happened in the Ridgecrest sequence?
How does the path of radiated seismic energy
and site conditions affect strong ground motion?
How variable is fault slip, and what is the nature of the surface slip deficit?
How are large stress changes dissipated around faults following the earthquake?
What are the depth- and time-dependent properties of fault damage and healing?
And what is the rheology of the fault zone and it’s lower crustal roots
and the upper mantle? All of these are questions that can be
addressed through the ephemeral data produced by an earthquake sequence.
So an important aspect of this is coordination of observations.
And these run through a whole different set of disciplines – aftershock
monitoring, geodetic monitoring, geologic mapping of the surface rupture
and imaging, post-seismic deformation observations, forecasting in real time
earthquake probabilities, characterizing the effects of strong ground motion.
And, over a slightly longer time scale,
perhaps fault zone drilling to ascertain the properties of the fault zone at depth.
SCEC tries to coordinate their activities through its response portal.
It is a priority to update this response portal to be more mobile-friendly.
It has served us well in a number of events over the last couple of decades.
It’s an event-based forum that’s very low-friction and easy to use and
browse and share anything you want. And the idea is really just to make
that low-friction site for people to share information.
The website is response.scec.org, and anyone with a SCEC login,
which you need to register for the SCEC annual meeting,
you also have a login to this site.
So what are we – what is the objective of coordination of earthquake response?
Well, really it comes down to ephemeral data.
Aftershock and geodetic monitoring – it’s ideal to try and get instruments
deployed within a day of the event to capture fault afterslip,
maybe even capture large aftershocks in great detail.
It’s important to conduct surface rupture mapping and imaging,
although the nature of that is changing. Really the ephemeral data that
disappears the most quickly is often the detailed offsets of features, whereas
mapping out the fault planes and assessing the whole deformation picture
is now supplemented with imaging from InSAR, optical imaging, and Lidar.
Post-seismic deformation – it’s important to define rupture endpoints,
identify afterslip, and strategically deploy geodetic instrumentation.
And the sooner it’s deployed, the better that signal.
Operational earthquake forecasting – ideally, we like to have telemetered
aftershock data to capture focal mechanisms, ideally down to
magnitude zero completeness and as soon as possible,
right during when the aftershock sequence is most productive.
Strong ground motion characterization – identifying
unusual damage due to anomalous shaking and deploying instrumentation
to try and understand the path and site effects that led to that.
And then fault zone drilling is a large coordinated experiment
that SCEC is suited to contribute to developing.
And I’m going to wrap it up there. Thank you for your time.