Posts tagged earthquake
Mini quakes to shimmy the Rio Grand rift
Jan 11th
IN COLORADO AND NEW MEXICO, NEW STUDY SAYS
The Rio Grande Rift, a thinning and stretching of Earth’s surface that extends from Colorado’s central Rocky Mountains to Mexico, is not dead but geologically alive and active, according to a new study involving scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
“We don’t expect to see a lot of earthquakes, or big ones, but we will have some earthquakes,” said CU-Boulder geological sciences Professor Anne Sheehan, also a fellow at CIRES. The study also involved collaborators from the University of New Mexico, New Mexico Tech, Utah State University and the Boulder-headquartered UNAVCO. The Rio Grande Rift follows the path of the Rio Grande River from central Colorado roughly to El Paso before turning southeast toward the Gulf of Mexico.
Sheehan was not too surprised when a 5.3 magnitude earthquake struck about 9 miles west of Trinidad, Colo., in the vicinity of the Rio Grande Rift on Aug. 23, 2011. The quake was the largest in Colorado since 1967 and was felt from Fort Collins to Garden City, Kan.
Along the rift, spreading motion in the crust has led to the rise of magma — the molten rock material under Earth’s crust — to the surface, creating long, fault-bounded basins that are susceptible to earthquakes, said Sheehan, a study co-author and also associate director of the CIRES Solid Earth Sciences Division. The team studied the Rio Grande Rift region to assess the potential earthquake hazards.
Using Global Positioning System instruments at 25 sites in Colorado and New Mexico, the team tracked the rift’s miniscule movements from 2006 to 2011. “Questions we wanted to answer are whether the Rio Grande Rift is alive or dead, how is it deforming and whether it is opening or not,” said Sheehan.
The high-precision instrumentation has provided unprecedented data about the volcanic activity in the region. Previously, geologists had estimated the rift had spread apart by up to 2 inches or 5 millimeters each year, although the errors introduced by the scientific instruments were known to be significant. “The GPS used in this study has reduced the uncertainty dramatically,” Sheehan said.
Using the latest high-tech instrumentation, the scientists found an average strain rate of 1.2 “nanostrain” each year across the experimental area, the equivalent of about one-twentieth of an inch, or 1.2 millimeters, over a length of about 600 miles. “The rate is lower than we thought but it does exist,” Sheehan said.
The researchers also found the extensional deformation, or stretching, is not concentrated in a narrow zone centered on the Rio Grande Rift but is distributed broadly from the western edge of the Colorado Plateau well into the western Great Plains. “The surprising thing to come out of the study was that the strain was so spread out,” Sheehan said.
Results of the study are published in the January edition of the journal Geology.
The team plans to continue monitoring the Rio Grande Rift, probing whether the activity remains constant over time, said lead study author Henry Berglund of UNAVCO, who was a graduate student at CU-Boulder working at CIRES when he completed this portion of the research. Also, the team may attempt to determine vertical as well as horizontal activity in the region to tell whether the Rocky Mountains are still uplifting or not, Berglund said.
“Present-day measurements of deformation within continental interiors have been difficult to capture due to the typically slow rates of deformation within them,” Berglund said. “Now with the recent advances in space geodesy we are finding some very surprising results in these previously unresolved areas.”
As far as the potential for future earthquakes in the region, the study’s results are unequivocal, however. “The rift is still active,” Sheehan said.
The new study also is co-authored by CU-Boulder Associate Professor and CIRES Fellow Steven Nerem, Frederick Blume of UNAVCO, Anthony Lowry of Utah State University, Mousumi Roy of the University of New Mexico and Mark Murray of New Mexico Tech.
The National Science Foundation provided the funding for this study and the NSF-funded EarthScope program and UNAVCO provided instruments, equipment and engineering services. The Boulder-headquartered UNAVCO is a nonprofit, university-governed consortium that facilitates geosciences research and education.
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CU team to turn on “green” lights in Haiti
Jan 5th
CU ENGINEERING TEAM TO SUPPORT
GREEN ENERGY IN HAITI
A team of University of Colorado Boulder engineers will travel to Haiti this month to support the growth of green energy on the two-year anniversary of the country’s devastating earthquake.
Engineering professors Alan Mickelson and Mike Hannigan and graduate student Matt Hulse will be in Haiti Jan. 8-16 to collaborate with the Neges Foundation school at Leogane to create a vocational training program on the installation, operation and maintenance of renewable energy systems.
“I’m eager to learn about the people of Haiti and the services that they would like energy systems to provide,” said Hannigan, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “Historically, the development of energy systems has shaped nations and economies, so the timing is right to pass along what we have learned about those energy systems that are sustainable.”
The Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake that struck Haiti destroyed what little electricity infrastructure had existed in the country, plunging towns across the country into total darkness and forcing households to rely on high-cost diesel generators for power, according to news reports. As a result, families are unable to study or work at night, and the number of assaults, particularly against women and girls, has increased.
Studies point to Haiti’s great potential for renewable energy, including solar, hydro and wind power. “The present lack of a Haitian power grid cries out for a distributed solution — that is, one that grows from small, localized, renewable energy sources,” said Mickelson, associate professor of electrical, computer and energy engineering.
To address these issues, the Engineering for Developing Communities project will:
- Develop a curriculum for vocational training on the operation and maintenance of self-contained, adaptable power sources, and electrical operations and maintenance with a focus on green energy systems.
- Build local capacity to provide vocational training on renewable energy systems using a “train-the-trainers” approach.
- Identify a viable system to create sustainable access to renewable energy that will meet basic household energy needs.
- Develop a strategy for the sustainable scale-up and replication of energy and infrastructure vocational training to support reconstruction efforts, with a focus on private sector investment.
About $35,000 has been provided for the initiative by CU-Boulder’s Mortenson Center for Engineering in Developing Communities, the IEEE Foundation and the CU-Boulder Outreach Committee. The Mortenson Center is seeking additional funding to build upon the initiative and develop additional vocational training curriculum on sustainable and disaster-resistant design and construction.
The Mortenson Center was founded to promote integrated, participatory and sustainable solutions to the engineering challenges of the developing world, with a focus on clean drinking water, sanitation and hygiene; energy; sustainable and disaster-resistant building materials and shelter; and cook stoves and indoor air quality. For more information, go tohttp://ceae.colorado.edu/mc-edc.
CU-BOULDER PART OF INTERNATIONAL TEAM TO DISCOVER NEUTRINOS CAN CHANGE ‘FLAVORS’
Jun 15th
An international research team led by Japan and including the University of Colorado Boulder may have taken a significant step in discovering why matter trumped antimatter at the time of the Big Bang, helping to create virtually all of the galaxies and stars in the universe.
The experiment, known as the Tokai to Kamioka experiment, or T2K, included shooting a beam of neutrinos underground from the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, or J-PARC, on the country’s east coast to a detector near Japan’s west coast, a distance of about 185 miles. Elementary particles that are fundamental building blocks of nature, neutrinos generally travel at the speed of light and can pass through ordinary matter, like Earth’s crust, with ease. Neutrinos come in three types: muon, electron and tau.
The T2K team discovered that muon neutrinos can spontaneously change their “flavor” to electron neutrinos, a finding that may help explain why the universe is made up mostly of matter rather than antimatter, said CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Alysia Marino of the physics department, who is part of a university contingent that participated in the experiment. Scientists had previously measured the change of muon neutrinos to tau neutrinos and electron neutrinos to muon neutrinos or tau neutrinos, she said.
The shift of muon neutrinos to electron neutrinos detected in the new experiment is a new type of neutron oscillation that opens the way for new studies of a matter-antimatter symmetry called charge-parity, or CP violation, said Marino. “This CP violation phenomenon has not yet been observed in a neutrino, but may be the reason that our universe today is made up mostly of matter and not antimatter,” she said.
Scientists believe matter and antimatter were present in nearly equal proportions at the onset of the Big Bang. Since matter and antimatter particles cancel each other out, it has been proposed that there must have been CP violation in the early universe that produced slightly more matter than antimatter, which accounts for all the stars, galaxies, planets and life present today.
The T2K project is a collaboration of roughly 500 scientists from 12 nations. Other participating U.S. institutions include Boston University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the University of California-Irvine, Colorado State University, Duke University, Louisiana State University, Stony Brook University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Rochester and the University of Washington. The United States contingent is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
The CU-Boulder group includes Marino, physics Associate Professor Eric D. Zimmerman, postdoctoral researchers Stephen Coleman and Robert Johnson, graduate students Andrew Missert and Tianlu Yuan, and former undergraduates Christopher Vanek, Bryan Kaufman, Eric Hansen, Zhon Butcher and Joshua Spitz.
The CU-Boulder team designed and built one of three magnetic horns used to generate neutrino beams. The horns are large aluminum conductors that use very high electrical currents to produce a magnetic field. The magnetic field focuses on short-lived neutrino-producing particles called pions and kaons, enhancing the intensity of the neutrino beam, said Zimmerman.
The CU-Boulder researchers also developed a device to monitor the position of the proton beam that creates the neutrinos. In addition, they contributed to the installation and operation of a T2K detector at the J-PARC site 60 miles northeast of Tokyo that measures the neutrinos right after they are produced, Marino said.
Zimmerman said more data will be required to confirm the new results. The J-PARC accelerator is being repaired following damage from the earthquake that hit Japan on March 11. The accelerator and experiment are expected to be operational again by the end of the year, said Zimmerman.