Jared Bryan, a graduate student in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will present his recent work “Seismic Monitoring of Mount St. Helens from Summit to Slab” in our Advanced Computing Seminar. The seminar will be online and take place on Friday, June 18 2021, at 5PM (GMT+2). Send an e-mail to alex.breuer@uni-jena.de if you’d like to attend.

Abstract: Mount St. Helens is the most active volcano in the Cascadia volcanic arc. To forecast its future eruptions and understand their driving processes, we need to link changes in the state of the volcano to changes in seismic observables. Noise-based seismic interferometry has emerged as a useful tool for monitoring magma transfer and the pressurization state of volcanic systems, but its sensitivity to velocity perturbations decreases rapidly with depth. We need new methods to monitor deep crustal processes. This presentation discusses our approach to seismic monitoring, which uses receiver functions, a form of event-based seismic interferometry, to quasi-continuously sample the crust beneath Mount St. Helens. We first validated the method with synthetic receiver functions, and then built a catalog of over 27,000 receiver functions at Mount St. Helens using magnitude 5.0+ teleseismic earthquakes from 2009-2020. Considering the seismic monitoring problem within the optimal transport framework, we used the Wasserstein distance and associated transport map to characterize the changes to receiver function waveforms. We discuss the possible mechanisms for these waveform variations, including slow-slip events on the nearby Cascadia megathrust. In future work, we plan to use this method to directly measure the rheology of magmatic systems and to observe the full migration pathways of magma from its source to the surface.

About the Speaker: Jared Bryan is a graduate student in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying seismology. His research focuses on using passive seismic monitoring methods to understand dynamic processes in fault zones and volcanoes, with a particular interest in slow slip events and deep volcanic processes. He received bachelor’s degrees in physics and geosciences from Utah State University in 2020. He participated in the SCEC internship program in 2018, hosted by Dr. Alexander Breuer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and in 2019, hosted by Dr. Marine Denolle at Harvard University.