IGPP is pleased to invite you to join its Spring 2022 Seminar Series presentation featuring New Mexico Tech's Susan Bilek. Dr. Bilek's talk, "Adventures in environmental seismology: Using geophysical and hydrologic data analysis to explore bedload transport in ephemeral streams and water flow through karst aquifers" will be available via Zoom on Tuesday, May 24, 2022, starting at 12:00pm. Zoom: https://ucsd.zoom.us/j/98991316613?pwd=bjBCYmt4aDVaZnBZbFY3VHpiU1diZz09. Password: bedload
Image: Example hydrologic (top) and seismic (middle, bottom) data collected during the very active summer 2021 monsoon season in the Arroyo de los Pinos research station. Seismic data captures rainfall, water flow, bedload, and anthropogenic signals (train in this example) during a several hour long flood event within the ephemeral channel.
Time: 12:00 pm, Pacific Time
Location: Zoom
Note: This meeting will be recorded. Please make sure that you are comfortable with this before registering.
Abstract: Seismic analysis techniques have been applied to a variety of environmental problems in recent years, including monitoring drought with seismic velocity changes and seismic noise to examine river processes. In this seminar, I will describe a few of the applications my research group has been tackling, focusing on understanding sediment transport during flash floods in desert environments as well as tracking flow and water levels in karst aquifers. The first example uses seismic methods to examine transport of small to medium gravel bedload in the ephemeral Arroyo de los Pinos tributary of the middle Rio Grande in central New Mexico during the southwestern U.S. monsoon season. This location combines several broadband and nearly 70 node seismometers with a state-of-the art sediment research station, instrumented among others with several automatic bedload samplers, microphones, and hydrophones. I will provide an overview of data collected over the first three years of the multi-year experiment, presenting a range of analyses including site characterization using active source seismic experiments, seismic recordings of multiple flood events, comparison of seismic power with bedload transport and other hydrologic parameters. In addition to the bedload transport study, I will provide brief overviews of our applications of seismic monitoring of flow and water level changes in karst systems in the carbonates of southeast MN and north central FL.