Science at Cal - Peggy Hellweg - Tectonic Timebombs: Earthquakes Near and Far
Channel: ckleinastro
Date: 14/05/2012

Earthquakes have been prominent in the news during the past year or so, with the deadly and damaging earthquakes from Haiti, Chile, New Zealand and, most recently Japan. I'll talk (and answer questions) about these quakes, as well as about the earthquake hazard from the faults in our back yard.

The speaker, Dr. Peggy Hellweg, is a "child of Cal". Her father was a UCB professor of physics for many years. After Sputnik, he slowly transitioned to K-12 science eduction, based on "experimentation" with how his own children learned to understand. Our speaker went on to study physics, herself, at the University of California San Diego, where she completed her BA after spending her junior year abroad in Germany. She then returned to Germany and earned a masters in physics at Goettingen. Finished with college for the time being, she turned to seismology and worked at the seismological laboratory of Germany's Federal Institute of Earth Sciences and Resources. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, she returned to the United States, where she worked in earthquake monitoring at the United States Geological Survey. She earned her doctorate in 2000 at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, on seismicity associated with volcanoes. Since 2001 our speaker is at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, where she is now operations manager. The Berkeley Seismological Laboratory operates a network of high quality seismometer stations which record earthquakes from throughout the world.