When people think of Earthquakes in the United States, they almost undoubtedly think of California and the San Andreas Fault, forgetting the all-too-mysterious seismic zone east of the Rocky Mountains, the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ). This region extending from Memphis, Tennessee north to St. Louis, Missouri, is the most seismically active region of the country east of the Rockies, and it doesn’t let you forget it. In 1811 and 1812, a series of M>7.0 earthquakes in the region caused enough damage and fright to keep new land dwellers at bay for nearly a century. Today, the New Madrid Seismic Zone is the main focus of the Center for Earthquake Research and Information (CERI) at the University of Memphis, in conjunction with the USGS. Thus, by extension, this was the topic of my research during my time spent in Memphis, Tennessee this summer.

Over the past decade or so, advances in earthquake detection, analysis and modeling have allowed a surge of research in that area. Some of the most important studies on the region include the creation of velocity models, which essentially show that a given earthquake of a given magnitude at a given depth and map view location will expel a primary wave (p-wave) and secondary wave (s-wave) at predictable speeds. My work was focused on gathering a number of these velocity models, which can vary in their interpretation of the Earth’s crust and wave behavior, and attempting to join them all together into a single, highly detailed velocity model that covered the whole of the New Madrid Seismic Zone.

Simply gathering prepared data and throwing it all into a single amalgamation proved to be more complex than one might think. The first step for any intern hoping to tackle this work is to get familiar with the geology of the region. As someone who was from the eastern seaboard and knew little about the Mississippi-Arkansas-Missouri region, I had to spend the first few weeks simply reading research articles on the region. Fortunately, my mentor had set up a discussion seminar and invited the entire CERI workforce to read a new article every week and then meet on Mondays to discuss that paper. As a student, this was a great help not only in terms of education about the region, but also in researcher interaction. The professionals working at CERI were the top professionals in their fields (Seismology, Hydrology, etc.) and they were all working on the same topic: the New Madrid Seismic Zone. So getting to see how these experts interacted, exchanged ideas and discussed problems was a learning experience in itself.

Joining together a large series of velocity models for the NMSZ proved to be a more difficult task than one might think. For the duration of my time at CERI, I tripped, stumbled and inelegantly did my part to that end. Although the tangible product of my time at CERI was small, the exposure to new systems and data analysis software proved to be the real product of my research. Utilizing unix-based command prompt every day for file sharing and organization, learning the basics of Matlab and using ArcGIS as a 3D modeling solution for the first time were all part of this real product I had found at the end of my internship.