Nearly 2 million data lines fill the screen of
Vedran Lekic’s computer every day, each representing seismic waves that are
detected from of the more than 1,700 seismic stations around the U.S. From this data, Lekic is creating a map that will not only cover all 48
contiguous states, Alaska and Puerto Rico, but also dive deep into the Earth’s
crust and core.
As a doctoral student at the
University of California, Berkley, Lekic formulated higher-resolution images of
the Earth’s mantle structure, stemming from his creation of a global seismic
velocity model. Not only is the model able to give geologists a better
understanding of plate tectonics, but it also helps explain the movement of
continental plates and their evolution, Lekic said.
How the data is used
Lekic’s research is based on ground vibration
recordings, which he and his students use to detect the scattering of seismic
waves across the North American tectonic plate. In conjunction with the
National Science Foundation’s EarthScope Facility network, the data is collected
from the 49 states and Puerto Rico and makes up about 3.8 million square miles,
Lekic said. EarthScope is kind of like our Apollo mission, but
not as costly,” Lekic said
In recognition of his efforts to integrate computer
science and geological studies, Lekic joined the ranks of 17 other early career
U.S. scientists and engineers who were awarded a Packard Fellowship for Science
and Engineering last week. Lekic is now one of five alumni faculty members who
have received the award while at this university, and he will be given access
to unrestricted funds of $875,000 over a five-year period to support his
extensive research on Earth’s inner structure. Now that a large fund has been granted to his work,
he hopes to spend more time plotting the seismic information in graphs and
models so that he may better understand the Earth, Lekic said.
“The great thing about this fellowship is its
flexibility to go chase a really good idea to wherever it leads,” said Orr, a
Stanford University professor. “It is an incredibly valuable fund and gives the
researchers an opportunity to take off with a good idea instead of waiting a
year or more for federal money.”
Lekic has already used the seismic information to
investigate why and how the crust moves over the Earth’s mantle. As of now, the
deepest any machine has been able to dig was about 12 kilometers into the
Earth’s crust, a minuscle fracture of the roughly 6,730 kilometers it takes to
get to the Earth’s core. Using the seismic information helps geologists see the
shapes and sizes of the Earth’s layers.
“We are both interested in the energy that moves
the tectonic plates and creates the magnetic shield around the planet,” geology
professor William McDonough said.
Lekic and McDonough are attempting to harness that energy
to create another way to build a model of the Earth. “What we do is comparable to how an ultrasound
let’s us see through our bodies,” Lekic said. “But this lets us see through the
Earth.”
Other than his seismology research contributions,
Lekic is also a forerunner in the new geological field of neutrino geoscience. Neutrinos are a type of electrically neutral
subatomic particle that are created during radioactive decay or some kinds of
nuclear reactions. The particle, which was only discovered geologically in 2005
and physically
detected for the first time last year, moves through every kind of
object, McDonough said. “It sounds magical; it’s like a particle that
exists but you can’t really see,” Lekic said of neutrinos.
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