Hiroo Kanamori, the John E. and Hazel S. Smits Professor of Geophysics at Caltech, one of the most respected seismologists in the world, will be visiting the UW campus March 12-15 to present the 2002 Mindlin Lecture. His visit comes shortly after the first anniversary of the Nisqually earthquake, which was a rather modest shake similar to those we experienced in this region in 1949 and 1965. He will remind us that a much more damaging earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone may lie ahead. Although the existence of this subduction zone was recognized much earlier, it was his work in the 1980’s that first quantified the size and likelihood of a future earthquake here.

In his lecture he will review the progress that has been made in understanding the basic physics of earthquakes that allows seismologists to forecast the overall long-term seismic activity and policy makers to anticipate damage in order to make response plans. Despite the progress that has been made, earthquakes continue to be a major threat to our society, as we have recently witnessed in Turkey, Taiwan and India. Although the interaction between many factors that control seismic rupture makes accurate forecasts of individual earthquakes very difficult, it is possible for society to take a number of actions that can mitigate their effects. Dr. Kanamori is a proponent of some new and innovative techniques for doing this, utilizing real-time seismological methods combined with structural control technology.

Dr. Kanamori’s research accomplishments are most impressive, with fundamental contributions to our understanding of earthquake source processes, the nature of subduction zone earthquakes, the production of tsunamis by earthquakes and slow earth movements, earth movement generated by volcanic eruptions, and the interaction of the solid earth and the atmosphere. He also developed the moment magnitude scale, today the most commonly used reference magnitude for earthquakes. 

He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship of the National Academy of Sciences, the Walter H. Bucher medal of the American Geophysical Union and the Medal of the Seismological Society of America.

Kanamori, H., and M. Kikuchi, The 1992 Nicaragua Earthquake: a slow tsunami earthquake associated with subducted sediments, Nature, 361, 714-716, 1993.

Kikuchi, M., and H. Kanamori, The mechanism of the deep Bolivia earthquake of June 9, 1994, Geophys. Res. Lett, 21, 2341-2344, 1994.

Kanamori, H., T. H. Anderson, and T. H. Heaton, Frictional melting during
the rupture of  the 1994 Bolivian Earthquake, Science, 279, 839-842, 1998.

Kanamori, H., E. Hauksson, L. K. Hutton, and L. M. Jones, Determination of
Earthquake Energy Release and ML Using TERRAscope, Bull. Seismol. Soc.    Am., 83, 330-346, 1993.

Kanamori, H., and T. H. Heaton, Microscopic and macroscopic physics of
earthquakes, AGU Monograph Series 120, "GeoComplexity and the Physics of Earthquakes", J. B. Rundle, D. L. Turcotte, and W. Klein, Eds., 147-163, American Geophysical Union, Washington D. C.,  2000.

Kanamori, H., and J. Mori, Microscopic processes on a fault plane and their
implications for earthquake dynamics, in Problems in Geophysics for the New Millennium, Enzo Boschi, G\367ran Ekstr\367m and Andrea Morelli, Eds., 73-88, Editorice Compositori, Bologna, 2000.

Brodsky, E. E., and H. Kanamori, The Elastohydrodynamic Lubrication of
Faults, J. Geophys. Res., J. Geophys. Res., 106, 16,357-16,374,  2001.

Mindlin Lectures are sponsored by a grant from the Mindlin Foundation to the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. This presentation is co-sponsored by the University of Washington Departments of: Earth and Space Sciences, and Civil and Environmental Engineering.