“Ever since I was a kid I assumed I would be a scientist,” said Greg Beroza, the Wayne Loel Professor of geophysics. “I grew up in the post-Sputnik era. It was just sort of the spirit of the times that being a scientist was an important thing to do.”
Beroza teaches courses in seismology and studies how earthquakes work and how strongly they shake the ground. His research has included constructing “virtual earthquakes” to forecast the strength of shaking in cities like Los Angeles and Tokyo, measuring the strength of manmade earthquakes, and developing a new “Shazam for earthquakes” data-mining approach to detect previously overlooked microquakes. “My research group is data-driven – we let the Earth speak to us,” he said. “Of course, we have to be listening in the right way.”
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Projects in The Senior Reflection mix science with art. They have included documentaries, sculptures and performances and expressed students’ views on nature, health and personal experiences. Earth systems student Alex Nguyen-Phuc, ’18 was featured for the eight-course dinner she served at the O’Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm.
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Rob Jackson, a professor of Earth system science, was selected for substantial contributions to our understanding of plant ecosystem biology, greenhouse gas effects and environmental sustainability.
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A fossil study from Stanford University finds the diversity of life in the world’s oceans declined time and again over the past 145 million years during periods of extreme warming. Temperatures that make it hard for cold-blooded sea creatures to breathe have likely been among the biggest drivers for shifts in the distribution of marine biodiversity.
