Friday, June 30, 2006

USGS, Caltech Dedicate Earthquake Media Center

The USGS and the California Institute of Technology dedicated their new media center yesterday, showing members of the media the newly renovated center. The new center includes a 10-by-6-foot video wall that was donated by Dell, showing video, presentations, and "Shake Movies" that shows an animation of seismic waves shortly after an earthquake. The new center uses a 1024-node Dell supercomputing cluster to provide shake movies of recent earthquakes less than an hour after the event. The center is regularly called upon by the press any time there is a major or minor earthquake, and experts there including Lucy Jones of the USGS and Kate Hutton of Caltech are regular commentators on seismic events in California.