CSUEB professor adds Japan quake to curriculum

• April 1, 2011 5:00am

When the magnitude 9.0 Japan earthquake hit March 11, the thoughts of Mitchell Craig, associate professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, turned to students from his fall general education Natural Disasters class.

"It was a very diverse group," he said, "with students representing many other seismically active parts of the world, including Japan, Central America, Indonesia, China, and India. When we talked about seismic events, that topic was definitely very interesting to them."

Craig added a question to the final exam for students of his winter Earthquake Seismology course, giving them information about the Japan quake's location and source mechanism, then calling upon them to determine the fault plane based upon their knowledge of plate tectonics, the dynamics of the Earth's shifting outermost rigid shell riding above its more deformable lower layers.

His students have been getting more than textbook learning, since they even have opportunities to conduct field studies at times. For instance, over the summer, a couple of student assistants had an opportunity to work on a project funded by the U.S. Geologic Survey on a study of an active East Bay fault. By creating images of variations underground through a technique that reflects back sound waves through different layers of rock and soil, his team built up detailed images of old stream beds that had been offset some 10 - 20,000 years ago.

Combined with data from recent trenches and boreholes, these profiles will help geologists measure movement of the Green Valley Fault, which runs near Cordelia in Solano County and across the Carquinez Strait, parallel to the Hayward Fault.

NG