Historical Earthquake Estimation

Most understanding of seismic history is based on instrumental data collected since the mid-1900s. The goal of this project – a collaboration with colleagues at Brigham Young University and Tulane University – is to leverage textual records of tsunamis to estimate earthquakes from teh pre-instrumental era. Because the records are inherently uncertain – ``human seismometers’’ – it is a natural setting for statistical inversion. The project was made possible via the help of a huge number of students working on components from both the geological and computational perspectives.