ETA says the annual award "is presented to an individual for outstanding service to electronic technicians as a certification administrator, board of director’s office, state representative or subject matter expert on the ETA advisory board for the past year."Ĭameron Karch has been a part of the communications industry since 1983, specializing in voice and data protocols. Browne Memorial Technician of the Year Award. “It’s a great time for earthquake studies because the data is absolutely exploding.Cameron Karch, a fiber-optic technician with the Light Brigade, AFL's education and training division, is the recipient of the International ETA’s Norris R. “It’s a privilege to be back here, knowing some of the most famous people worked here, but at the same time we’re always trying to redefine seismology, we keep looking for new technologies to make the network even better, from satellites to artificial intelligence,” Zhan said. Zhan said a collaborative “learn more, do better” attitude at Caltech can move mountains, or at least help scientists fine-tune their understanding of the Earth. Closer to today’s timeline, seismologist Lucy Jones continues to serve as a visiting associate in geophysics at Caltech. That was the time Hugo Benioff invented instruments for detecting seismic waves, and Charles Richter and Ben Gutenberg collaborated on what became known as the Richter Scale for measuring an earthquake’s magnitude. Zhan is mindful of the seismological footsteps he is following at Caltech, where modern earthquake seismology was born in the 1920s and ‘30s. “We may be the only regional network trying to integrate that kind of a signal into our traditional dense broadband seismic network through different research projects with faculty,” Gurnis said in a campus article celebrating the lab’s centennial last November. Mike Gurnis, director of the Caltech Seismological Laboratory, called Zhan’s research a key pillar in the Seismo Lab’s priorities. Seismologists have always wanted better and more sensors to study earthquakes, and fiber sensing with telecom cable is just a perfect fit.” The new thing here is to use the technology to study earthquakes. “People quickly realized that environmental perturbations could cause problems in communication,” he added. The idea of using optical fibers to sense the environment came in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when fiber optics started, Zhan said. The National Science Foundation paid for the study. They include Jiaxuan Li, first author Nadia Lapusta, professor of mechanical engineering and geophysics at Caltech graduate student Teaho Kim and scientist Ettore Biondi. The Zhan Group spent about four years on this research. “Better understanding can help a lot in our preparations for earthquakes, our knowledge about kinds of earthquakes and gives us a higher chance of capturing quakes.” “Using fiber optic cable as a series of seismometers reveals aspects of earthquake physics that have long been hypothesized but difficult to image,” Zhan said. This array acts as individual seismometers and gives earthquake scientists details on the motion of seismic waves. The team used laser emitters to shoot light through the cables, which have tiny defects every few meters that reflect a part of the light to the source. Zhan and colleagues studied a section of the fiber-optic cable using DAS, or distributed acoustic sensing. This week, Zhan and a four-member team published a study in the journal Nature, reporting success in piggybacking off underground fiber-optic cables in Pasadena to detect temblors at a higher resolution, parsing intricate details of the earthquake. That fascination led Zhan to Caltech, where he earned his doctorate in geophysics in 2014, and where he now teaches geophysics. “I knew I was interested in earth science, but when I saw how the entire community was mobilized to study that quake within a few days, how we were able to learn a lot, I was amazed by the scientists’ capability to gather so much data without actually going onsite, just by using sensors, to learn more and to help people,” Zhan said. He was an undergrad student in China when a 9.1 magnitude earthquake ruptured the sea floor in the Indian Ocean, generating a massive tsunami that killed 230,000 people. Zhongwen Zhan, 36, can trace one watershed moment in his life to a literal earth-shaking event.
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