Geologic Hazards / Volcanology

Develop cutting-edge computational tools that provide 3D views of Earth’s crust using gravity and magnetic fields. Results of these efforts will have a wide range of applications from mapping natural resources to evaluating natural hazards. These tools will be applied to airborne geophysical data, especially those collected for the USGS Earth MRI effort.

This opportunity focuses on integration of geophysical modeling with constraints on alteration mineralogy from spectral measurements on drill core and hyperspectral remote sensing data.

Earthquakes, such as the 2011 M5.7 Prague, Oklahoma, and recent northern Texas M4 event, demonstrate the need for improved understanding of site amplification and seismic hazards in the central United States. The intern will be trained by USGS scientists to use the state-of-the-art site investigation methods at seismic station sites in California before applying the methods in Oklahoma and Texas.

The advent of national geophysical initiatives (e.g. EarthScope, AusLamp, SinoProbe) has started the race to develop regional- and national-scale geophysical models. In parallel, the need for such models is on the rise within the natural-hazard and resource sectors. This internship focuses on development of three-dimensional electrical resistivity models derived from magnetotelluric (MT) data.

Collaborate with developers of the state-of-the-art, open-source, community-code PyLith to add new features and use them to model complex earthquake or volcanic processes. This is your opportunity to expand your software development, numerical modeling, and geoscience skills while furthering your research and contributing to the broader community!

Biological productivity in the Gulf of Alaska is limited by availability of the micronutrient iron. Dust derived from Alaskan glacial flour and from Asian deserts, and ash from Alaskan volcanoes, episodically supply iron from the atmosphere. This internship would carry out studies on archived material from a variety of dust and ash samples to examine controls on the supply of this micronutrient.