Developed by: Dr. Derek Schutt, Department of Geosciences, Colorado State University
Prerequisites: Physics II; Calculus III. Along the way, we’ll also delve into complex numbers, differential equations, tensor and matrix algebra, Unix/Linux, shell scripting, and MATLAB.
Description: Quantitative introduction to seismology; basics of seismic data analysis; fundamentals of wave propagation; earthquakes; structure of the Earth.
General Information:
This is an upper division course that introduces the main principles of seismology. The course is structured somewhat traditionally: we'll follow a textbook, have regular homework, lectures, a midterm and final exam. In addition, we'll discuss recent research in the field of seismology as well as recent earthquakes that happen throughout the term.
Our lab will be focused on practical teleseismic research. We’ll first start with a few exercises devoted to learning your way around in a Linux/Unix environment, then download some data, and move into some basic data processing. Your final lab project will be to take real data and analyze it.
Seismology is a fairly young field, and understanding earthquakes and Earth's interior is still a very active area of research. The Stein and Wysession textbook does a nice job covering the basic principles at a level appropriate for our class (and in some cases, beyond). We'll fill in the gaps with modern ideas and results from the literature (in some cases augmenting from other text books). Each lecture will have a PDF associated with it, where the math will be explained in greater detail than the book.
This field requires knowledge of some math to be able to work through the concepts. We'll review math principles, as needed, in order to facilitate understanding the concepts. With these basics under our belt, we'll address the pressing questions pursued today, from understanding how to decipher the Earth's internal structure to earthquake prediction, from internal dynamical processes inferred from seismology to monitoring nuclear testing with seismic data, and so on.
Textbook:
Stein, S. and M. Wysession (2002), An Introduction to Seismology, Earthquakes, and Earth Structure, Blackwell Publishing.
Optional Textbook:
Shearer, P. (2009), Introduction to Seismology, 2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press.
Lectures:
Acknowledgements. I’d like to thank Ed Garnero at Arizona State University and Heather DeShon at Southern Methodist University. We have collaborated on developing similar classes and are sharing materials. I’ll try to mention in class when I use something derived from Ed or Heather. I’d especially note that Ed’s lecture notes have formed the basis for mine, and he did all of the hard work.
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