>> OK, my name is Gavin Hayes.
I'm a Penn State grad.
I did my PhD here and graduated in 2007.
And from there I moved to
Colorado, where I had a Post Doc
at the USGS National Earthquake
Information Center.
So the EIC, as we call it, is the group
that's responsible for locating earthquakes
around the world, and for figuring out how big
they are, and for telling everyone about them.
So we release information as quickly as
possible about the [inaudible] earthquakes
to aid agencies, to the public, to the press, to
anyone that needs to know about the earthquake,
and then do something about
it with the information.
An earthquake in Southern California is
kind of probably not a typical example,
because we have so many stations in
California that record those seismic waves.
But given an earthquake in Southern California,
we'd probably know about it within 30 seconds
or a minute, and we'd probably
be releasing information
about the earthquake within
just a couple of minutes.
So a big earthquake somewhere else in the world,
that's more of a kind of
10 to 20 minute time scale.
Well, on a day-to-day basis, I'm
doing research on earthquakes.
If there's not an earthquake that we have
to respond to, I am studying earthquakes.
I'm studying plate tectonics.
I'm trying to understand the interactions
between earthquakes and the plate boundaries
that they occur on, so that we can get some idea
about where these big events typically occur,
why they occur there, and what that
means for the future probabilities
of earthquakes in those locations.
We try to keep the word "prediction"
out of most of what we do,
because we really don't think we're at the
stage now, or will be in the foreseeable future,
where we can predict earthquakes.
But what we can tell is where
they've occurred in the past,
and we can understand those fault systems
to figure out why they've occurred there,
and what time scales they reoccur on.
And, therefore, some idea of, you know, we think
over the next 30 years or 10 years or something,
there is a high likelihood of there
being this size earthquake in this place.