Predicting the Next Quake

Reported March 2010

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- A month after a quake hit Haiti, more aftershocks continue to rattle the country. The 7.0 hit so fast, so violently, there was little anyone could do. Understanding changes in the earth's surface is key. Now a new laser mapping technology is changing the way we see the world.

Two-hundred-thousand dead; 300,000 injured. The quake hit Port-Au-Prince without warning, but now, new technology could help predict the next big natural disaster.

Noah Snyder, Ph.D., a geologist at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Mass., uses light detection and ranging or lidar technology to see changes in the earth.

In one lidar image of Death Valley, you can see a small building destroyed by flooding that would be missing from earlier digital maps. The lidar images reveal more details helping seismologists find hidden fault lines to predict the next earthquake or detecting subtle changes in the earth's surface indicating a potential landslide.

"It can be a life saving technology in that it helps us make predictions about what might happen in the future," Taylor Perron, Ph.D., a geologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained.

To create a lidar map, a GPS guided airplane shines a laser beam on the earths surface. The beam is reflected back to the plane; slowly if reaches the earth's surface or quickly if is hits a mountain peak.

"It just simply allows us to look at the earth's surface in much more detail then we've ever had," Dr. Snyder said.

This information is used to make a digital topographic map of the earth's surface.

"For instance, here we can't see much of anything, but that's a valley right this is the same valley in the lidar image," Dr. Snyder explained.

The new imaging is improving the studies of the earth, and could one day help to save lives.

Lidar also provides data about the earth's landscaping, allowing people to see through the trees. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the laser, which was first demonstrated in 1960. For more information on LaserFest, go to www.laserfest.org.

The Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society and the American Geophysical Union contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Ed Hayward
Public Relations Officer
Boston College
haywarde@bc.edu

James Riordon, Media Relations
American Physical Society
College Park, MD
(301) 209-3238
http://www.aps.org
Riordon@aps.org

Optical Society of America
Washington, DC 20036-1023
(202) 223-8130
http://www.osa.org
info@osa.org

Peter Weiss
American Geophysical Union
Washington, DC 20009-1277
(800) 966-2481
http://www.agu.org
pweiss@agu.org

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