LOGAN – The National Science Foundation (NSF) invests in researchers as they probe the unknown and seek to understand nature’s great mysteries.
Within the NSF, the Frontier Research in Earth Sciences (FRES) supports research on Earth systems, from the core to the critical zone.
USU researchers, from left, Brady Cox, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Alexis Ault, Dennis Newell and Srisharan Shreedharan, Department of Geosciences, are principal investigators on an NSF-funded, multi-institution project that combines expertise and infrastructure from Utah State’s interdisciplinary centers for earthquake research. (Photo Credit: USU/M. Muffoletto)
A team of Utah State University scientists was recently awarded a $2.3 million FRES grant to fund collection of fragile samples from large and damaging 7.8 and 7.6-magnitude quakes near the Turkey-Syria border.
USU geoscientist Alexis Ault, who traveled to the site of those damaging quakes last summer, will be joined by Brady Cox, founding director of USU’s Earthquake Engineering Research Center, along with her Geosciences colleagues Dennis Newell and Srisharan Shreedharn. Scientists from Cal State Fullerton and Brown University will also help pursue this five-year project.
Ault said at the core of the project is understanding the earthquake cycle processes that are warning signs of such powerful forces.