Director's Message

Colleagues,

A reminder that next week we have Prof Carol Frost from University of Wyoming visiting to present the Inaugural Chappell Lecture. A number of events will be occurring during the week, including another research seminar on Tuesday and an opportunity for our ECRs and HDR students to engage Carol on career and other matters.

It is with considerable sadness that I regret to let you know of the death of Emeritus Professor Ian MacDougall. I was informed by Pam, Ian’s partner that Ian died on Saturday evening, and although this was after a long period of illness this was somewhat unexpected. Notice of Ian’s funeral can be expected in the Canberra Times sometime mid-week.  

We have a high level delegation from BMKG in Jakarta visiting the School this week.  BMKG have responsibility for monitoring, modelling and issuing earthquake and tsunami warnings in Indonesia.  They are a significant and important international partner for the School as part of our Earthquakes NIG Goal and also a key participant in the new joint 1+1 Master of Geohazards being set up with ITB Bandung. Please make them feel welcome.

Finally, Paul Tregoning will be Acting Director for the coming couple of weeks while Greg Yaxley, Simon McClusky and I are visiting leading institutions in India.  The purpose of the trip is to build research links with selected institutions, to seek opportunities in the context of the Indian Government’s new SPARC collaborative funding program, and to promote our Future Research Talent Scheme.

Best wishes for the weeks ahead.

Steve

Expression of interest

The ANZIC Office is looking to hire a part-time (4 days/week) Program Administrator to provide administrative and executive support, working closely with the Program Scientist and Communications Officer. The position is currently advertised on Jobs - ANU with applications closing 15th November.

Reminder

2018 Inaugural Chappell Public Lecture is on Thursday 22nd Nov 4.30 - 5.30 pm, with refreshments to follow.

Featuring guest speaker Dr Carol D. Frost from the University of Wyoming. The lecture series is in honour of Professor Bruce Chappell. 

If you haven't registered please register here by 19th Nov.

Abstract for Cliff Thurber’s talk on 3rd December 2018

A major field project was carried out in March 2016 at the Brady geothermal field in west-central Nevada, as part of a Department of Energy project nicknamed PoroTomo.  A vibroseis truck was used as a repeatable seismic source, and both nodal seismic instruments and a distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) system were deployed in the study area.  The main goal of PoroTomo is to demonstrate the potential for developing a fine-scale model of the physical properties of a portion of the geothermal field, in this case the volume around the injection wells.  The field work was scheduled to overlap the time period of a planned shut-down of the geothermal power plant for annual maintenance, allowing for detection of possible temporal change in the subsurface structure as fluid injection and extraction rates were varied.

My presentation will consist of three parts.  First, I will present a brief comparison of data from the DAS system and the nodal array.  After making corrections to convert DAS data from strain rate to ground velocity and convert geophone array data from ground velocity to strain rate, we find excellent agreement between the two data types for a regional earthquake.  Next, I will show the results from a tomographic inversion of P-wave travel time data from the vibroseis source on a combined node and DAS dataset.  Finally, I will present the results of the analysis of earthquake activity that occurred during the 2016 plant shutdown and other shutdown periods before and since 2016.  We find clear evidence that cessation of fluid pumping triggers earthquakes at Brady.

Clifford Thurber, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The 20th Australian Organic Geochemistry Conference (AOGC) - Origins of oil, old organics and organisms