Brain Teaser #1: Expect the unexpected at NSC!

By Dr. Edwin Price, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Environmental Science

Under a dark desert highway

a few NSC students see

a stealthy, toothy predator

down prey much bigger than he

What is he?

Photo Courtesy of purpleslog via flickr

NASA Grants Create New Learning Opportunities

LAS has two new learning opportunities sponsored by Nevada NASA Space Grant Consortium.

Summer 2011: Research in Astronomy
Students will engage in research projects to rediscover some of the monumental findings in astronomy. For example, the class will confirm the expansion of the universe using cutting-edge data collected by one of the most ambitious, influential and ongoing surveys in the history of astronomy, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. In its third phase, this survey, with its 2.5 meter telescope in New Mexico, is diligently capturing and storing deep sky data. After learning the relevant concepts in astronomy, the students will dive into the data from this digital survey to answer some key questions:

How do you find the age of a star cluster?

How do we weigh a galaxy?

How do we know we have dark matter in the universe?

The projects will introduce students to theory, data collection, data processing, programming, data analysis and literature search – aspects which are integral part of conducting research in astronomy. 

This course will be taught by Dr. Sandip Thanki.

Dr. Thanki and astronomy students at NSC.





The 2.5 meter SDSS Telescope

A star cluster



A spiral galaxy











All space photos courtesy of The Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

A Fall 2011 Course: Global Warming

With the first grant in 2009, a new environmental science course was developed to give students experience in natural hazards investigations using satellite imagery and ground-truth surveys.  Students identified hazardous cliff collapse areas along a section of the Las Vegas Wash inside Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

The recent award is for developing and conducting an introductory course in climate change science.  In this course students will investigate climate basics and gain an understanding of why our global climate is changing. This course will include discussions about:

What are the causes of climate change? 

What is the science behind climate change?

What are the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and societal welfare? 

What can or should we do about it?

The course will investigate the major scientific data and projections by NASA and by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to understand why most scientists believe Earth’s climate is in a state of human-caused crisis.

This new course will be offered fall semester 2011 under the name GEOL 110, Global Warming for three general science credits.  It will be taught by Dr. Edwin Price

Dr. Price and NSC environmental science students out in the field.

NSC Seismograph and the Japan Earthquake

The 8.9 magnitude Japan quake recorded by the NSC seismograph
by Dr. Edwin Price, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor of Environmental Science

The 8.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan on Friday, March 11, was detected by the NSC seismograph, located deep underground at the Liberal Arts and Sciences building.  It was still Thursday evening when the seismic waves passed through the Las Vegas area at 9:46 pm., March 10.  It took only 12 minutes for the seismic waves to travel through the Earth’s crust from Japan to Las Vegas.  That is a travel speed of approximately 26,700 miles per hour.

Why was the Japan quake so large?

Northern Japan sits literally on top of the tectonic plate boundary between the Eurasian Plate, which includes most of the Asian continent, and the Pacific Plate, which consists of most of the Pacific Ocean.  Here these two plates are moving toward each other at a rate of about 3.5 inches per year.  Typically, the Pacific Plate crushes and slides underneath the Eurasian Plate, right beneath northern Japan.  This sliding is along a large inclined fault called a subduction zone. The high amount of compression between the two plates is normally taken up by earthquake-generating fault slippage along the subduction zone.

The subduction zone fault, which comes to the surface on the ocean floor just east of northern Japan, had not slipped in many decades.  A consistent 3.5 inches of compression per year had been building up in the rock over this time.  It finally snapped along the fault on March 11, sending seismic shock waves in all directions. 

What caused the tsunami and why was it so large?

Tsunamis are caused by a sudden shift of the sea floor either up or down.  In the case of the devastating Indonesian tsunami of 2004 and as is thought to have happened in the Japanese tsunami, the sea floor popped up several feet along one side of fault zone exposed in the ocean floor.  If a part of the sea floor suddenly moves up, the ocean surface directly above also is suddenly pushed up creating a mound of water in the ocean.  As the mound of water settles down, water flows out in all directions across the ocean in the form of low, but very long-wavelength waves.  As the waves encounter shallow water they build in height, and if the land is flat, can flow up onto the land.  Once on land the waves then return as backwash toward the ocean, carrying debris out to sea.



Image courtesy of Jim O'Donnell at BC-Geophysics, Geophysical Consultant/Contractor.
World mapping of the distance between Japan and the seismograph at NSC.

  


Image courtesy of Jim O'Donnell at BC-Geophysics, Geophysical Consultant/Contractor.
Actualy activity captured by the NSC seismograph.