January 6, 2016 Program: Is Reno Prepared for the Next Large Earthquake? Are you prepared?

 
Dr. Graham M. Kent will discuss the earthquake hazard in and around the Truckee Meadows, with the necessary (and largely ignored) steps of building economic resiliency into our region and ways to stay safe when the ground begins to shift.
 
Dr. Kent is Director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory/ and Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences and Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno.
 

Previous to July 2009, Graham was a Research Geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and had been Director of the Visualization Center at Scripps from 2001-2009. Dr. Kent is a native of South Lake Tahoe, California. He attended San Diego State University, where he studied Geophysics and graduated Valedictorian of the Class of 1985. Soon thereafter, he entered graduate school at Scripps Institution of Oceanography receiving his PhD in 1992. 

After a 4-year-long appointment at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Graham returned to Scripps to continue his work in geophysics, with an emphasis toward seismic studies of extensional tectonics, ranging from magma chambers beneath mid-ocean ridges to fault hazards at Lake Tahoe. While at Scripps, he led an effort to use advanced visualization techniques to study faulting and volcanic systems. 

Dr. Kent has conducted a variety of studies around the globe, including tsunami and ocean bottom seismic research. He’s mapped earthquake faults beneath Lake Tahoe that have produced tsunamis and most recently has placed important constraints on southern San Andreas Fault recurrence times through mapping cross faults beneath the Salton Sea. More recently, his research interests include mapping fault hazards within the Walker Lane using seismic imagery in lakes and airborne LiDAR on land. He is currently one of two PIs on a $15M research program to map faults hazards offshore of Southern California (California Public Utility Commission funded) in association with nuclear storage at San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station (SONGS). 

He also brought ShakeOut to Nevada in 2010 (1st state to join California); the 6th Annual Great Nevada Shakeout earthquake drill (Oct. 15th, 2015) in partnership with the Great Shakeout was the largest combined public earthquake drill in the world. 630,000+ Nevadans participated in this exercise last year. Kent is also spearheading AlertTahoe, a public and private program to bring earthquake early warning (EEW) to the Tahoe region, and build out a fire camera network for early detection of ignition in the basin. This system has scored early successes in alerting fire personnel of the earliest stages of fire ignition at Tahoe, and more recently, in central Nevada as part of a parallel Wildland Fire Camera network funded by BLM. AlertTAHOE is gearing up for the upcoming El Nino (2015-16) to place additional sensors in the field to better predict the real-time evolution of ARkstorms. 

He is married to Stephanie Kent, a Tahoe native, and has two children, Matthew and Christine. Graham was also a NASA Astronaut Finalist, Class of 1996.