NEES@UCSB - Permanently Instrumented Field Sites for Soil-Foundation-Structure-Interaction

Francesco Civilini and Robin Gee outside Girls Inc. Goleta

Girls Incorporated is a national non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring girls to be strong, smart, and bold. The Girls Inc. Goleta Valley Center held a science fair on March 13th, 2012 and NEES@UCSB was one of the main presenters. The team hosted the seismology booth where girls learned about plate tectonics an earthquakes.

The NEES@UCSB Outreach Team

The NEES@UCSB education and outreach team atended Hollister Elementary School Science Night. Make Your Own Earthquake stations were set up at opposite ends of the room and connected to a central printer by a wireless router. Children could choose to create an earthquake "in 3D", by jumping next to a MEMS accelerometer that captured and displayed motion in all three (X,Y,Z) components, or they could create an earthquake that simply captured the vertical (Z-axis) motion of their jumping. Some chose to do both!

A student jumping on a desk, which generates more ground motion than jumping on the classroom floor.

Hope Elementary School Science Saturday consisted of many presenters including NEES@UCSB. The outreach team brought posters and the Make Your Own Earthquake station for students to learn about ground motion and seismographs. For the first half of the day students jumped on the classroom floor, then the students switched to jumping on an upside down a desk. Jumping on the desk produced the largest earthquakes due to the flexure and movement of the desk.

Monroe students proudly show off the earthquakes they generated at the Make Your Own Earthquake Station.

The NEES@UCSB Education and Outreach team visited Monroe Elementary School. Dr Jamie Steidl discussed plate tectonics and why earthquakes occurs at plate boundaries. He showed slides illustrating the travel of seismic waves through the earth and the crust. His presentation was followed by a question and answer session, after which, every student was invited to make their own earthquake and watched a demonstration of fault slippage.

Dr. Jamie Steidl speaking on tsunami risks in Santa Barbara

• Click the link to watch the video: http://www.keyt.com/news/local/Preparing-to-be-Tsunami-Ready-132678018.html

Francesco Civilini and "Make Your Own Earthquake"

The NEES@UCSB education and outreach team visited the Mountain View School and displayed posters and set up Make Your Own Earthquake stations. Posters included images of plate tectonics, the earth's interior, and seismicity in southern California. The NEES@UCSB education and outreach team also brought an old seismometer for show and tell. Along with discussions, students generated earthquakes by jumping next to MEMS accelerometers. Students left with printouts of the earthquakes they generated.

Sandra Seale at SCEC 2011

The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) is a community of over 600 scientists with a basic goal of understanding the physics of the Southern California fault system and predict key aspects of earthquake behavior. Members of NEES@UCSB attended the 2011 annual conference in Palm Springs, submitted abstracts, and presented research at the poster sessions.

NEES Workshop: Jamie Steidl

• The 4th International Symposium on the Effects of Surface Geology on Strong Ground Motion (Video link): http://www.keyt.com/news/local/Earthquake-Experts-Share-Findings-128348803.html

• KLCU Report on Earthquakes (Audio link): http://www.kclu.org/2011/08/25/scientists-engineers-from-around-world-in-santa-barbara-county-to-exchange-latest-data-on-earthquakes/

NEES REU Student during poster session.

NEES@UCSB hosted the annual NEES Young Researcher Symposium (YRS), an event that brings together students from NEES equipment sites across the country taking part in the NEES Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Program . Each of the students presented their research in a poster session during the symposium.

NEES@UCSB Data retrieval team at Piñon Flat Observatory

In September 2010 NEES@UCSB deployed 10 portable seismic stations at Pinon Flats, California. This experiment, led by Asaf Inbal and Pablo Ampuero of Caltech, aims to record tremor (long period) signals generated by the San Jacinto and San Andreas Faults. Every month a team must service the site by swapping out hard drives containing the previous months' data and making sure all seismometers are successfully recording ground motion. In August 2011 NEES REU students were given the opportunity to assist NEES@UCSB graduate students in the monthly site visit.

Garner Valley lies between two active fault zones - the San Jacinto and the San Andreas.

Summer NEES REU interns from UCSB and UCLA spent a day at the Garner Valley field site. Dr. Jamie Steidl of UCSB gave a tour of the seismic monitoring facilities. Dr. Bob NIgbor and Dr. Jon Stewart of UCLA gave a demonstration of a shaker driving vibrations in the Soil-Foundation-Structure_Interaction test frame. The event was attended by more than 20 summer students.

Students learn about plate tectonics.

Fillmore Elementary 4th-6th graders visited UCSB. Dr. Jamie Steidl gave a short introduction to plate tectonics, seismology and earthquakes and answered questions from the students. Each student participated in Make Your Own Earthquake.

Make Your Own Earthquake station and posters.

The NEES@UCSB education and outreach team visited the Montessori Center School and displayed posters and set up Make Your Own Earthquake stations. Posters included images of plate tectonics, the earth's interior, and seismicity in southern California. The NEES@UCSB education and outreach team also brought an old seismometer for show and tell. Along with discussions, students generated earthquakes by jumping next to MEMS accelerometers. Students left with printouts of the earthquakes they generated.

Dr. Sandra Seale and Santa Barbara Fire Chief.

Seismologist Dr. Jamie Steidl and Dr. Sandra Seale spoke to local fire departments about earthquake and tsunami hazards in the Santa Barbara area. Their presentations discussed the potential for damage from earthquakes and tsunamis to our local community and also provided scientific background on how and why these natural disasters occur.

The discussions followed the April 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The devastation in Japan illustrates just how damaging earthquakes and tsunamis can be to coastal areas. It is essential to understand the extent to which an earthquake or tsunami could impact our local community in order to best prepare for the event before it happens.

Adults were just as eager to learn..

The NEES@UCSB education and outreach team visited the Mountain View School science night 2011. Two Make Your Own Earthquake stations were set up at opposite ends of the room and connected to a central printer by a wireless router. Children could choose to create an earthquake "in 3D", by jumping next to a MEMS accelerometer that captured and displayed motion in all three (X,Y,Z) components, or they could create an earthquake that simply captured the vertical (Z-axis) motion of their jumping. Some chose to do both!

Watch the movie

We nick-named these brothers P and S wave.

The NEES@UCSB education and outreach team visited the Hollister Elementary school science night 2011. The team encountered problems while setting up the Make Your Own Earthquake station because the MEMS accelerometer was not recording anyone's jumping. It appeared broken.

The team discovered the problem was not the accelerometer, which successfully recorded motion when shaken by hand, but rather, the concrete floor it was taped to. The Make Your Own Earthquake station requires the ground have some flexibility, which allows the accelerometer to shake. To solve the problem the team tried taping the accelerometer to carpet, cardboard boxes and shelves, but none recorded a significant amount of motion. Finally the team took a large school desk, attached the accelerometer, turned it upside down and jumped on top of it. To the kids' surprise, jumping on the the upside down desk produced the largest earthquakes due to the flexure and movement of the desk.

Watch the movie

The entire 6th grade class makes an earthquake.

The NEES@UCSB Education and Outreach team visited Roosevelt Elementary School sixth graders in Santa Barbara. Prof. Jamie Steidl discussed the structure of the earth, its core, mantle and crust. He showed slides illustrating the travel of seismic waves through the earth and the crust. The nature of the Moment Magnitude scale (10³⁰) was demonstrated through examples. Every student was invited to make their own earthquake using the Quake Catcher Network accelerometer, which are available to all educators from the Quake Catcher Network (http://qcn.stanford.edu) .

Watch the movie of the entire sixth grade making an earthquake

Demonstrating fault slippage.

NEES@UCSB was invited to present Make Your Own Earthquake to the 6th grade of Monroe Elementary School in Santa Barbara. More than 60 students, their teachers, and Science Specialist Ellen Hunter attended the afternoon event. Dr. Jamie Steidl gave a short introduction to Plate Tectonics, Seismology and Earthquakes and answered questions from the students. Each student participated in Make Your Own Earthquake and watched a demonstration of fault slippage.

The NEES@UCSB team brought the latest Make Your Own Earthquake.

Adams Elementary School of Santa Barbara invited NEES@UCSB to join a dozen other presenters for their science night. The latest Make Your Own Earthquake is built from a MEMs accelerometer that is just a few centimeters square.

Dr. Sandra Seale discussed the liquefaction potential of soil at NEES@UCSB permanently instrumented field sites including the Wildlife Liquefaction Array (WLA) and the Garner Valley Downhole Array (GVDA). Her presentation to the California Central Coast Chapter of the Association of Environmental and Engineering Geologists included liquefaction data from the recent Sierra El Mayor earthquake.

• Abstract

Abstract

Professor Olivia Walling with the recipients of the 2010 Engineering Writing Award.

Professor Olivia Walling presented the 2010 Engineering Writing Award to four UCSB freshman engineering students for their paper A Transfer Function for the Improvement of Seismic Data Collection. The students worked with strong motion data recorded at the nees@UCSB Wildlife field site, under the supervision of EOT Coordinator Sandy Seale.

The Sierra El Mayor 7.2 magnitude earthquake was about 200 kilometers from the Wildlife Liquefaction array.

Dr. Sandra Seale was interviewed by UCSB radio KCSB 91.9 just weeks after the Sierra El Mayor 7.2 magnitude earthquake of Northern Baja California. Dr. Seale discussed the mechanics of large ground motions created by earthquakes of this size and the future of other fault zones in the region.

• Podcast: http://www.radioip.org/2010/05/04/dr-seale-on-the-baja-earthquake/

Dr. Sandra Seale needed line control to keep the students in line for the "Quake Maker" where they see the effects of their jumping on the seismometer.

NEES@UCSB went to the Washington Elementary School science night with the Quake Maker and the "Fault Frogger." The Quake Maker is an accelerometer, digitizer and laptop computer running seismic acquisition software. It is spare professional equipment that measures the ground movement generated by children's jumping.

The Make Your Own Earthquake machine was as popular as ever.

NEES@UCSB returned to the Hollister Elementary School science night with the "Quake Maker," an accelerometer, digitizer and laptop computer running seismic acquisition software. The school is near the University of California at Santa Barbara campus.

• Local NoozHawk article: http://www.noozhawk.com/schools/article/030610_science_night

What, exactly, does a seismologist do?

Isla Vista Elementary school, just a mile from the UCSB campus, visited NEES@UCSB to learn what a seismologist is and the instruments used to record earthquakes. As always, the Make Your Own Earthquake machine was on hand.

Students left with a printout of their own earthquake.

The Hope Elementary School Science fair is an annual event that brings many well produced exhibits from the area's impressive list of contributors. In 2006, NEES@UCSB was joined by the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History (http://www.sbnature.org/), along with its Ty Warner Sea Center, and several University of California at Santa Barbara departments.

'Tez' Tadepalli and Jamie Steidl describe the several active faults in the vicinity of the Garner Valley Field Site.

Students from the University of California at San Diego and Los Angeles who participated in Research Experiences For Undergraduates visited the SFSI structure and instrumented field site at Garner Valley. About 20 students made the several hour drive from San Diego and Los Angeles to see a live demonstration of the SFSI building shaker, as well as boreholes and instrumentation.

After the presentation, the students drove north to the San Andreas fault zone near Palm Springs. In this desert area the fault zone is clearly visible.

Watch the video...

Frank Vernon of IGPP points to the waveform traces after remotely running the SFSI shaker.

At the 2007 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (http://www.aaas.org/), the remote telepresence and teleoperation features of the experimental structure at Garner Valley were demonstrated to scientists attending the meeting in San Francisco, through an interactive display at the National Science Foundation booth in the exhibition area. Frank Vernon of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP http://www.igpp.ucsd.edu/) remotely activated the 80kg shaker mounted to the experimental structure and displayed waveforms recorded by sensors located on and around the structure.

Real-time video stream and teleoperation are possible because of the High Performance Wireless Research and Educational Network (HPWREN http://www.hpwren.com/). It is through the HPWREN network that data is streamed from the remote sites at Garner Valley and the Imperial Valley Wildlife Management Area to computer systems at UCSB for analysis and storage.

The San Diego Super Computer Center hosted the training session.

A Field Training Workshop was held in on May 18, 2006 following the COSMOS workshop for Site Selection, Installation and Operation of Geotechnical Strong-Motion Arrays. After the training session guests were invited to the Wildlife and Garner Valley Liquefaction Arrays.

• Cosmos: http://www.cosmos-eq.org/events/GSMA2_Workshop/index.html

Children jump near an actual seismometer to create their own earthquake.

The sixth graders from Ellwood Elementary School visited the UCSB campus and learned firsthand how scientists measure earthquakes. Using a Geotech Instruments Model S-13 seismometer housed in a see-through plexiglass case, the students were able to develop an understanding for how ground motions are measured by seismologists.