Marine and coastal sedimentary archives show that the Cascadia Subduction Zone can generate great earthquakes of ~M9, most recently in 1700 CE, yet we still know little of the impacts of these events inland of the Pacific coast. Inland lakes have recently been exploited for their use as paleoseismic records...
Discrete fault systems accommodate both N-S contraction and dextral shear in concert with clockwise rotational deformation of the North American plate above the Cascadia Subduction Zone. In Washington, the Yakima Fold and Thrust Belt (YFTB) accommodates N-S contraction as a series of ENE-WSW trending thrust faults and folds. NW-striking, predominantly...
By inverting EarthScope long-period magnetotelluric (MT) data from the southeastern United States (SEUS), we obtain electrical conductivity images that provides key insights into the geodynamics of this region. Significantly, we resolve a highly electrically resistive block that extends to mantle depths beneath the modern Piedmont and Coastal Plain physiographic provinces....
Cinder cones are useful geomorphic features for geological analysis because they generally have known initial states and follow a similar pattern of degradation as they are exposed to erosive processes. This is largely because cinder cones are produced by monogenetic eruptions. Characterizing large cinder cone fields in terms of age...
This dissertation reports on four related, though separate projects. The first project details the process of carrying out a digitally augmented soil mapping (DSM) effort alongside an ongoing survey in Oregon's Ochoco National Forest (ONF) using a Random Forest algorithm. The second chapter describes a initial soil survey in Oregon's...
The Toba Caldera Complex is the youngest resurgent caldera in the last 100 kyrs, formed from four overlapping eruptions starting 1.2 Myrs ago. The last caldera-forming eruption, the Youngest Toba Tuff eruption, occurred ~74 kyrs ago, emitting 2800 km3 of ash and pumice into the atmosphere and forming the caldera...
Tsunami loading can cause sediment instability, which can compromise the structural integrity of coastal buildings and infrastructure. To understand the process by which a tsunami can cause sediment instability, it is necessary to understand how the pore water pressure in the soil changes during tsunami loading. Tsunami run-up causes the...
To investigate the dynamic response of the outer accretionary wedge updip from the patch of greatest slip during the Mw8.8 2010 Maule earthquake, 10 Ocean Bottom Seismometers (OBS) were deployed from May 2012 to March 2013 in a small array with an inter-instrument spacing of ~10 km. Nine instruments were...
The Hi-CLIMB broadband seismic experiment (2002-2005) operated 233 stations along an 800 km long north-south line from the Himalayan foreland into the central Tibetan Plateau and in a 350x350 km sub-array within southern Tibet and central and eastern Nepal. Station spacing was approximately 8 km along the line and 50...