The San Andreas fault may be the major boundary between the Pacific and North American plates, but it is not the only one.
The Eastern California Shear Zone that traverses from the Salton Trough up the Owens Valley is very active and is the location of some of the larger earthquakes in California in the past three decades. This secondary plate boundary is home to a wide variety of feature including earthquake swarms, a moving mud spring, large earthquakes, and rapid tectonic motion. This talk will discuss these earthquakes and features ranging from the US-Mexico border to the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence.
Andrea Donnellan, PhD is manager of the Instrument Systems Section at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where she is also a principal research scientist. She leads of NASA’s Surface Topography and Vegetation Study and is principal investigator of the QUAKES stereo imaging instrument suite. Donnellan studies earthquakes and crustal deformation combining a variety of geodetic imaging techniques with computational modeling and infrastructure. Donnellan is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and The Explorers Club. In 1996 she won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers. Donnellan was a finalist in the astronaut selection process three times. The Donnellan Glacier in Antarctica was named by Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names in 2006 for her work on the Antarctic continent.