Lasting experienceScientist delays trip home to work on earthquake researchPosted May 28, 2010
Eugene Domack Instead, he made the difficult decision of booking a ticket out of Santiago to Concepcion, near the epicenter of one of the worst earthquakes in recorded history. Scientists in the United States and South America were coordinating their own emergency response to the massive magnitude 8.8 earthquake that struck the west coast of Chile on Feb. 27. Researchers were eager to install ground motion sensors — high-tech GPS instruments — in and around the quake zone of central Chile, according to Domack. The technology available today to measure ground motion wasn’t around even five years ago, he explained. “This was the first chance to get detailed, continuous measurements of ground motion after an earthquake of great magnitude,” Domack said. The geosciences professor from Hamilton College Mike Bevis Domack spent 10 more days in Chile, installing eight GPS stations for the study. “It was very gratifying work,” he said. “It was probably the two best weeks of my professional career — to be able to do something that I had skills at and was for a cause that was scientifically relevant to a very serious societal problem, which is how the ground is going to behave in the next big earthquake down there.” Preliminary measurements indicate that the earthquake moved the entire city of Concepcion at least 10 feet to the west, and shifted other parts of South America as far away as the Falkland Islands and Fortaleza, Brazil, according to online reports, including one published by the United Kingdom’s Telegraph newspaper. Researchers deduced the movement by comparing precise GPS locations known prior to the major quake to those taken almost 10 days later from the CAPS project. The National Science Foundation — which funded Domack’s work on the LARsen Ice Shelf System, Antarctica (LARISSA) NSF-funded scientists affiliated with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego Back on the surface, Domack got a good look at the devastation. He saw entire adobe villages flattened. “I’ll carry that [experience] into my classroom for the rest of my teaching career,” he said.
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