EARTH 324: Earthquakes and Tectonics

Course Details

Class Lectures: Tues and Thurs 12:30-1:50 PM, Tech F285 (Sloss room)

Professor: Seth Stein

Earthquakes: location, characteristics, origin, mechanism, and relation to plate motions; seismic hazard. Prerequisites: EARTH 202, MATH 250, and PHYSICS 135-2; or consent of instructor.

Required Texts: Introduction to Seismology, Earthquakes, and Earth Structure by S. Stein and M. Wysession (Blackwell Publishing, 2003).

Class lectures : these are large power point files, largely covering material in Stein and Wysession.

1: Introduction to Earthquakes and Plate Tectonics (largely from Stein and Wysession 1 & 5.1-2) 

2: Seismometers; Travel times in a spherical earth (largely from Stein and Wysession 6.6, 3.4-5) 

3: Amplitudes of seismic waves (largely from Stein and Wysession 3.7) 

4: Focal mechanisms (largely from Stein and Wysession 4.1-2) 

5: Waveform modeling (largely from Stein and Wysession 4.3) 

6: Moment tensors (largely from Stein and Wysession 4.4) 

7: Earthquake geodesy (largely from Stein and Wysession 4.5) 

8: Source parameters (largely from Stein and Wysession 4.6) 

9: Earthquake recurrence & hazards (largely from Stein and Wysession 4.7) 

10: Relative plate motions (largely from Stein and Wysession 5.1-2) 

11: Absolute plate motions & hotspots (largely from Stein and Wysession 5.2) 

12: Spreading centers (largely from Stein and Wysession 5.3 & 5.5) 

13: Subduction zones (largely from Stein and Wysession 5.4) 

14: Plate boundary zones (partly from Stein and Wysession 5.6) 

15: Continental intraplate earthquakes (partly from Stein and Wysession 5.6) 

16: Faulting & deformation (largely from Stein and Wysession 5.7) 

Resources

Unix tutorial

Vi editor tutorial

Introduction to the linux machines, vi, and nplot (pdf)

Fortran on macintoshes (pdf)