Northwestern researchers and seismologists near the East-African Rift, collaborate to deepen understanding of Earth’s systems

This May, Northwestern’s Earth and Planetary Sciences department is hosting a workshop titled “Volcano & Rift Seismicity in the Northern Branches of The East African Rift System.” The workshop, designed explicitly for early-career seismologists from different countries along the East-African Rift, is co-taught by Suzan van der Lee’s research group at Northwestern and Emily Brodsky, recipient of the 2022 Nemmers Prize in Earth Science. Van der Lee is the Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Northwestern.

This workshop will set the stage for a potential lifetime of collaboration on monitoring and better understanding a continental-scale feature that is simultaneously hazardous and promising.

“The East African Rift System is the only ongoing continental rift in our present geological period. Studying the rift together is important for understanding complex forces within the crust; forces that drive deformation, volcanism, and sudden shifts, as well as the potential forces we might activate when industrially interacting with the crust,” explained Van der Lee, who has led numerous big-data analyses and seismological data acquisition field experiments in Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

In the workshop, the East African participants will learn and form connections with North American researchers of the East African Rift from world-renowned educational and research institutions, fostering cross-continent collaboration. Participants will be invited to give a presentation on their seismological research and operations. They will also receive training in catalog interpretation, relative epicenter location, focal mechanism inference, and related topics.

“I’m looking forward to learning from and interacting with colleagues from a part of the world with which I have recently had little connection,” said Emily Brodsky, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Brodsky studies the mechanics underlying earthquakes, addressing questions about the processes that trigger earthquakes and the constraining forces and processes that occur inside a fault zone during slip.

Amid the world’s energy transition, this workshop is crucial in deepening understanding of Earth’s systems. Such knowledge is essential for developing sustainable solutions with minimal unintended negative consequences, making this collaboration more important than ever.

“Deepest and broadest understanding is achieved by collaboration and effective communication across oceans, political boundaries, and disciplinary specialization,” said Van der Lee, whose research aims to understand how the dynamics of planetary interiors are connected to planetary surface processes.