Station P472

Questions for Diego Melgar

How did you become a scientist/engineer?

When I was 8 we visited a mine in central Mexico and my parents bought me a bunch of rocks and minerals of different colors and textures—that's when I triumphantly informed them I wanted to be a geologist. Growing up in Mexico you are always close to an earthquake prone zone, or a volcano, or a hurricane making landfall somewhere so I was always interested in what made them work. Later on I went to school for geophysics engineering and pretty early on a professor asked me if I wanted to do field work with her over the summer installing some seismometers in southern Mexico. Well, that was it—I've been a seismologist ever since and I am now in the 4th year of my PhD in geophysics.

What is your job like?

My work is great. It's a combination of indoors and outdoors. I spend many days working on the computer analyzing data, making maps and figures to try to understand earthquakes better. But I also spend time outdoors, installing new stations, hiking with geologists looking at rocks and figuring out their story. I also go to sea and spend several weeks at a time on research cruises in areas like Indonesia where large earthquakes are likely, trying to understand what will happen when the next big one comes. I also travel to many interesting places for conferences and meetings where I talk to scientists from all over the world—I've been to places as far away as Chile and Japan.

What are you hoping to learn from your research?

I am most interested in how to respond quickly when large earthquakes happen. I use GPS and seismometers to improve earthquake and tsunami early warning methods. A lot of my recent research is spent creating rapid tsunami simulations so that when a large earthquake happens close to a populated coast we can give people several minutes worth of warning so they can get out of harm's way. I am also interested in how earthquakes affect structures and how we can quickly determine if a building is damaged or not following strong shaking to see if it can be reoccupied or if it is deemed unsafe.

Earthquake Engineering

P472 is located less than a mile from the world's largest outdoor shake table, operated by the University of California San Diego, where real-life, to-scale buildings are built and tested. We use P472 as a reference for all the tests on the shake table that involve GPS. Using the site as a "base station" allows us to collect very accurate measurements of how the buildings tested on the shake table behave. Many of the tests conducted at the shake table have a direct impact on the rules and regulations regarding the way we build buildings in California, and GPS measurements on the buildings are an important part of that.

Learn more about the shake table project through the project website.

Follow Diego Melgar's thoughts about earthquakes, in Spanish, at his blog Develando las geociencias.

Check out this video (mp4 format) and GPS data video (mpg format). The second video shows the motion of a GPS station on the roof of the building versus the one at the base.

Spotlight Questions