Earthquakes at the Nanoscale

goldsby news

In 2008, Sichuan province in China experienced a massive magnitude-7.9 earthquake caused by the collision of the Indian-Australian and Eurasian plates along the Longmenshan Fault. The earthquake, which has been ranked as the 21st deadliest quake of all time, flattened four-fifths of the structures in the affected area, destroying whole towns and villages and leaving millions of people homeless. Almost 90,000 people were killed.

Kaiwen Tian, who was born and raised in Sichuan, distinctly remembers hearing news of the quake. Although he didn’t personally know anyone who was killed, many people he knew had family or friends who died in the quake. This, Tian says, is a huge part of the reason he decided to study earthquakes.

In collaboration with Robert Carpick and David Goldsby, Tian, who graduated from Penn in 2017 with a doctorate in physics, recently published a paper in Physical Review Letters which attempts to tackle these devastating natural phenomena by investigating the laws of friction at the smallest possible scale, the nanoscale.

“A grand challenge goal for the geophysics community,” says Goldsby, Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, “is to come up with fundamental laws where not only do we know the form of the equations but we know all the coefficients as well: the numerical constants that go into the equation that governs friction.”

Full Story

Arts & Sciences News

Azuma and Hart Named Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professors of American History

Eiichiro Azuma specializes in Asian American and transpacific history, while Emma Hart teaches and researches the history of early North America, the Atlantic World, and early modern Britain between 1500 and 1800.

View Article >
Arts & Sciences Students Honored during 37th Annual Women of Color Day

Sade Taiwo, C’25, and Kyndall Nicholas, a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience, were honored for their work.

View Article >
Nine College Students and Alums Named Thouron Scholars; Will Pursue Graduate Studies in the U.K.

The Scholars are six seniors and three recent graduates whose majors range from neuroscience to communication.

View Article >
Irma Elo Named Tamsen and Michael Brown Presidential Professor in Sociology

Elo’s main research interests center on inequalities in health and mortality across the life course and demographic estimation of mortality. In recent years, she has extended her research to include predictors of cognition in high-, middle-, and low-income countries.

View Article >
Julia Hartmann Named Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor in Mathematics

She specializes in algebra and arithmetic geometry, a newer field that applies techniques from algebraic geometry to solve problems in number theory and co-developed the method of field patching.

View Article >
Holger Sieg Named Baird Term Professor of Economics

Sieg focuses his research on public and urban economics, as well as the political economy of state and local governments.

View Article >