Geology Open Night

In-service Credit is available for teachers attending the Geology Open Night lectures.

You may also be interested in the following lectures: Astronomy Open Night  usually the first Friday of the month, The Worlds of Physics usually the second Friday of the month, The Living World  the third Friday of the month and Our Environment usually the third Sunday of the month. In-service credit is also available for teachers for attending these lectures. All of these lectures are in ESS 001 Lecture Hall

There will be Refreshments and Demonstrations after the Geology Open Night Presentations.

Admission is Free!!

The Hayward Fault, before the Big One Dr. Christiane Stidham Department of Geosciences Stony Brook University 7:30 PM March 27, 2009 in ESS 001 The Hayward Fault runs through northern California’s San Francisco Bay Area, underlying many of its most populated regions. City planners in the area observe that they can locate the fault by connecting the locations of major hospitals in the East Bay, and no one living in the East Bay (a population of more than a million) lives more than a few miles from the Hayward Fault. As such, it has been one of the most studied faults in the world, but understanding of its past earthquakes has evolved very dramatically in recent years, giving us still only a toehold on estimates of likely future earthquakes. Given how many people will be affected by the next major earthquake on the Hayward Fault, it is important to improve our understanding of the fault’s behavior as best as possible, before the next Big One comes.  Dr. Christiane Stidham is a lecturer in the Geosciences Department at Stony Brook University. Her background is in both geology and geophysics, the product of a torturous graduate career. After a Berkeley dissertation on computer models of northern California earthquakes, she continued to a Harvard post-doc on computer models of southern California earthquakes (so as not to leave out the other California). The next step was to leave all of California behind. Since coming to Stony Brook, her emphasis has been on teaching, on natural hazards and environmental geology, and on re-learning East Coast geology, but she still thinks back fondly on the dangers and hassles of living in California. Wikipedia description of the Hayward Fault

 

Energy Materials at Stress and Temperature Distinguished Professor Donald Weidner Department of Geosciences Stony Brook University 7:30 PM April , 2009 in ESS 001   In the next couple of decades, we will need to make major changes in the basic sources of energy that is used to drive our society.  Either because of concerns of polluting our atmosphere with excess carbon or because we simply deplete the conventional oil resources, these changes are coming.  These realities will create a strong shift in the focus of scientific research.  Coping with the changes in our energy base will require breakthroughs in many scientific fields.  New federal investments are being directed in this fashion.   The next generation of energy production needs to be more efficient implying higher temperatures and higher pressures.  New materials with improved resistance to chemical corrosion, and the extreme conditions need to be defined.  Here I will illustrate how our high pressure research program will be used to provide information concerning the strength of materials under extreme conditions.  These experimental facilities were developed to study minerals deep within the Earth, but are directly applicable to study materials used to supply the next generation of energy.

In-service credit available for teachers and professional geologists

If your school requires that you have a sequence of educational opportunities in order to receive in-service credit, please advise them that during the Spring Semester we will be offering one-hour of in-service credit for each of the:

Ø Three Geology Open Nights - 
 

Ø Four Astronomy Open Nights - 
Website for more information is: www.astro.sunysb.edu/openight/opennite.htmll
 

Ø Three The Worlds of Physics - 
Web site for more information is: insti.physics.sunysb.edu/Physics/worlds.html
 

Ø   Three Our Environment
Website for more information is: www.geo.sunysb.edu/our-environment

Geology Open Night, Astronomy Open Night, The Worlds of Physics and the Living World meet in ESS 001 at 7:30 p.m.

We will offer  in-service credit for the Conference on the Geology of Long Island and Metropolitan New York on Saturday March 28, 2009and  the Long Island Geologists field trip in Spring

Information for these two events will be available on the Long Island Geologists web site at: www.geo.sunysb.edu/lig/