DrRebecca Colquhoun
Teaching Fellow in Geophysics and Quantitative Geoscience
Department of Earth Science & Engineering - Faculty of Engineering
- Teaching Fellow in Geophysics and Quantitative GeoscienceDepartment of Earth Science & Engineering - Faculty of Engineering
- Royal School of Mines, South Kensington Campus, United Kingdom
RESEARCH
My PhD was in earthquake mechanics and statistics. In my PhD I asked two main questions. At the single event scale, what processes go on in the earliest stages of rupture, and do they depend on magnitude? At a large scale, what processes cause earthquakes to occur when they do, and can foreshocks give insights into earthquake nucleation?
To address the former, I used short windows of waveforms to look for relationships between parameters calculated on these windows and the final magnitude of the earthquake. I also used source time function to probe the differences in moment release between large and very large earthquakes. These studies both used earthquakes from all around the world.
On the latter question, I investigated the extent to which earthquake-earthquake triggering can explain foreshock occurrence on the Hikurangi subduction zone, New Zealand. I found that earthquake nucleation must be more complex, with stochastic triggering mediated by fluid flow or aseismic slip.
To address the former, I used short windows of waveforms to look for relationships between parameters calculated on these windows and the final magnitude of the earthquake. I also used source time function to probe the differences in moment release between large and very large earthquakes. These studies both used earthquakes from all around the world.
On the latter question, I investigated the extent to which earthquake-earthquake triggering can explain foreshock occurrence on the Hikurangi subduction zone, New Zealand. I found that earthquake nucleation must be more complex, with stochastic triggering mediated by fluid flow or aseismic slip.