I make earthquakes in the lab to figure out what's going on in the Earth. I am a PhD student in the McLaskey Research Group at Cornell University.
The booming rupture of an earthquake makes this planet ring like a bell. The rupture rips through an imperfect discontinuity in the Earth's crust, a fault. Much like a canyon's ridge, faults have kinks, bends, moving water, and varying minerals. Unlike a canyon, earthquakes happen deep in the ground. To study these processes I create earthquakes at the meter length scale in the lab to uncover a fault's story inside the Earth's crust. This approach allows me to tackle the problem of what creates expansive earthquakes that can topple buildings, while minute others are unfelt at our feet.
I went to AGU2024! I gave a talk on precursory slow-slip fronts on the Whillans Ice Plain and their relation to a laboratory analog.
I'm a scientist, and part of that means sharing science. Papers take a while to write, so in the mean time I'll throw small things here.