Outreach activities

While we do not follow any particular ongoing outreach scheme, we are always open for any sort of interaction with the public and wider research community.

High-performance computing in seismology

Together with Lapo Boschi and Luis Dalguer, I was interviewed, leading to an ETH press release of the Petaquake project. NVIDIA, in an effort to promote usage of GPUs, covered this project as a case study as well. Film material on societal benefits of computational seismology with interviews in Iceland was also conducted under NVIDIA's authority, yet still to be released.

Hayden Planetarium exhibit

Together with astrophysicist Matt Turk (Columbia University, New York), sound engineer Jason Candler, geophysicists Ben Holtzman (Lamont-Doherty Observatory, Palisades) and Jeroen Tromp (Princeton University), we develop an audio-visual project of seismic wave propagation projected in the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History, New York. See Matt's youtube page for some fascinating rendering!

IRIS on-demand seismograms

IRIS is a major consortium of US universities to facilitate the acquisition, management, and distribution of seismological data. As a result, seismic data collected from stations around the world over the last few decades can be freely downloaded and used for research. Often, such data is used in the context of comparing to some sort of modeled equivalent, either in the form of tomography (i.e. a properly formulated inverse problem), or by inspection trace-by-trace. Traditionally, data and modelling have been seen and offered as separate entities. Our project which is still under development aims at bringing observed and modeled data closer. We will offer a comprehensive database of synthetic waveforms that allow for instantaneous, on-demand realization of arbitrary configurations in terms of earthquake-station distribution, earthquake properties, and spherically symmetric background models. This may be used by anyone in terms of analyzing the variability of waveforms upon these parameters, a formulation for source location and inversion, or simply a tool to extract desired seismograms quicckly and without any need to run numerical simulations. This project is jointly conducted between Tarje Nissen-Meyer, and Alex Hutko, Chad Trabant, Rich Karstens at the IRIS Data Management Center, Seattle, USA.

Interested?

If any of these or related topics spark your attention and interest, please do not hesitate to contact us.