Rio Grande Rift Project: Jenny Nakai

Jenny talks about her research, which involves using data from the EarthScope Transportable Array to study seismicity in the Rio Grande Rift region. The Rio Grande Rift appears to slowly be spreading apart, so Jenny is looking at whether there are earthquakes associated with this extension and whether these earthquakes are broadly distributed from east to west or are concentrated along normal fault zones. Her work includes poring through extensive seismic data to find events that might be actual earthquakes and to distinguish them from false detections caused by external events such as mine blasts. The goal is to build an earthquake catalog that identifies when, where, and at what depth earthquakes happened in this region.

Jenny’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program and by two EarthScope projects: Crustal Deformation Measurements and a Multidisciplinary Geophysical Investigation of the Rio Grande Rift (EAR-0454541) and Rio Grande Rift II: Kinematics and Dynamics of Continental Deformation in Low Strain-Rate Environments (EAR-1053596). Principal investigators for the two EarthScope projects are Anne Sheehan, Robert Nerem, and Anthony Lowry.

Video produced by McLean Media. Additional images courtesy Jenny Nakai, Alex Whitmore, Shutterstock, Google Earth, and the EarthScope National Office. Title animation by NASA and the Visible Earth Team (http://visibleearth.nasa.gov).

Title music provided by Flying Hands Music

Additional Music: “How it Begins” and “Deliberate Thought” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number EAR-1252031Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the producers and participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.