Public Science Initiatives
View the NEES Introduction video
The 1994 Northridge earthquake severely damaged over 1200 buildings and caused $30 billion in damages.
Earthquakes are one of natures most powerful, and largely unpredictable, events. Intense heat in core of the earth exerts forces on tectonic plates in the crust of the earth, or lithosphere, causing them to move very slowly. This movement, about as fast as your fingernails grow, creates extreme pressure on plates, causing them to scrape alongside each other or even to push one underneath the other. The motion, however, usually does not happen slowly. Rather, the pressure builds and then is suddenly released along a fault line creating reverberating waves of motion through the earth.
Although it may be a spectacular movie plot to try to alter these forces, it is much more practical to understand how they work and prepare buildings, roads and other infrastructure to withstand the resulting earthquakes as far as possible. Much has been done in the last 50 years to insure buildings can withstand the ground motion of earthquakes. The number of deaths and injuries caused by recent, very powerful, earthquakes in California are a fraction of what they are in other parts of the world that lack the stringent building codes.
Even as deaths and injuries have dropped, the cost of earthquake damage has risen. Some of the strongest ground motion ever recorded was in the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Southern California. Although deaths were limited to 57, over 12,000 structures were destroyed or severely damaged for a total cost of $30 billion. Recognizing the need to improve earthquake engineering and utilize more cost-effective construction techniques, the National Science Foundation formed NEES in order to pool resources and implement technologically up-to-date methods.
The National Science Foundation concluded that earthquake research was conducted in a manner that was too isolated. The techniques and methods did not lend themselves to results that were easily shared, evaluated and extended. Their solution was to both improve the facilities and connect them through a next-generation collaborative environment that utilized the Internet. The result is the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, NEES.
The NEES Consortium includes hundreds of engineering professionals at educational institutions across the United States and worldwide. NEES is a "Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction" with a 10 year lifespan.
