Take advantage of special programming before and after the technical sessions. On Monday, 14 April, attendees may choose among four workshops, two field seminars and an organized visit to Capitol Hill. On Friday, 18 April, two field trips offer a lesson on the geology of the local area along the Patapsco River and a behind-the-scenes tour of the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum and the Washington Fault Lines.
Schedule of the Week
Monday, April 14
Workshops
Organized Visit to Capitol Hill
Pride of Baltimore Field Seminar
Tuesday, April 15 – Thursday, April 17
Technical Sessions
Friday, April 18
Pride of Baltimore Field Seminar
Smithsonian and Washington Fault Lines Field Seminar
Jump to Field Seminars | Workshops
Field Seminars
Special Event: Meet with Policy Makers on Capitol Hill
Led by the SSA Government Relations Committee, participants will take part in an exclusive, organized visit to Capitol Hill on Monday, 14 April 2025 as part of the 2025 Annual Meeting. This is your chance to raise awareness about seismology, gain valuable government relations experience and make your voice heard!
Applications are open until 15 October 2024, and selections will be made by the SSA Government Relations Committee.
Questions? Email ssagrants@seismosoc.org.
Pride of Baltimore Field Seminar
Monday, 14 April, 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM
Friday, 18 April, 9:00 AM to Noon
Leave the hustle and bustle behind and come aboard Pride of Baltimore II for a two-hour day sail on the Patapsco River. Guests may lend a hand to raise the sails and imagine life as part of the crew in the 1800s or just relax and enjoy the sail. You will see Baltimore from a different perspective, from the water, as you sail on one of the most beautiful tall ships in the world.
Note: Children under the age of 12 are not permitted to attend the field seminar.
Price per person: $70
Smithsonian Private Tours and Washington Fault Lines Field Seminar
Friday, 18 April, 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Part One: Scientists in the Department of Mineral Sciences seek to understand the evolution of the Earth and Solar System by studying samples from environments ranging from the mantle to the surface, from volcanoes to the asteroid belt. The department is home to world-class collections of rocks, minerals, meteorites, and gems, as well as the laboratories used to simulate planetary processes and characterize specimens. Smithsonian staff are offering SSA a behind-the-scenes glimpse at some of these collections and laboratories. In the National Rock Collection, you will see rocks deemed worthy of curation in perpetuity for their outstanding value as research, exhibit, and cultural heritage specimens. In meteorites, you will explore the exploded remnants of celestial objects. In minerals and gems, you will observe spectacular specimens that have rotated off of, or are destined for, exhibit. In the fluids lab, you will witness a scale model of a volcanic eruption and see how destructive pyroclastic density currents can be quantified in the lab. Don’t miss this special event!
- Physical Volcanology Lab
- National Rock and Ore Collection
- National Gem and Mineral Collection
- National Meteorite Collection
Part Two: Enjoy a tour of the Washington fault lines and learn about the Atlantic Coastal Plain sediments in the National Zoo area, and the fault beneath the White House and Washington Monument. Participants will also learn about the levee system beneath the Washington Monument, history of the past shorelines, the canal and the historic gatekeeper’s house. The group will discuss the damage that transpired during the 2011 earthquake to the Washington Monument and the gravestones at the Congressional Cemetery. This is a highly technical field seminar that will delve deep into the science.
Note: Children under the age of 12 are not permitted to attend the field seminar.
*Please note: Attendees for this field seminar have the option to store their luggage in the bus and can arrange a ride to a local DC airport rather than riding the bus back to Baltimore at the end of the day. Please notify registration@seismosoc.org if you plan to take advantage of this option.
Price per person: $130
Workshops
Annual Meeting attendees may choose from four workshop options on Monday, 14 April.
- Building a High-Resolution Earthquake Catalog from Raw Waveforms: A Step-by-Step Guide
- Distributed Acoustic Sensing Open-source Software Workshop
- How to Open a Presentation and Foster a Great Q&A
- Seismic Instrumentation
SSA provides a discounted workshop fee for student members.
Building a High-Resolution Earthquake Catalog from Raw Waveforms: A Step-by-Step Guide
Monday, 14 April 2025, 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Instructors: Eric Beauce, Columbia-LDEO; William Frank, MIT; Clara Yoon, U.S. Geological Survey; and Weiqian Zhu, UC Berkeley
Earthquake catalogs provide deep insights into how the Earth works for our research and are a critical input to seismic hazard assessments. These readily available resources are the result of analyzing seismograms to detect earthquakes, identify wave arrivals and a series of inversions to produce estimates of hypocenters, magnitudes, moments and focal mechanisms. Understanding the strengths and uncertainties of each step is the key to doing excellent work. We will cover:
- 1) How to build earthquake catalogs with state-of-the-art methods such as template matching and machine learning.
- 2) Review Southern California Seismic Network’s real-time and earthquake catalogs along with special catalogs with refined locations, template matching for increased event detection and focal mechanisms.
- 3) The USGS Comprehensive Earthquake Catalog.
- 4) Catalog visualization tools to uncover artifacts, how to determine magnitudes and the parameters of the magnitude frequency distribution, including the magnitude of completeness.
- 5) How to reduce mistakes and ensure meaningful results.
Registration fees:
Price per person includes lunch.
- Students: $35
- Early-Career Members: $50
- Standard: $85
- Non-member: $100
Distributed Acoustic Sensing Open-source Software Workshop
Monday, 14 April 2025, 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Instructors: Derrick Chambers, NIOSH; Eileen Martin, Colorado School of Mines; Yida Song, Colorado School of Mines; and Shihao Yuan, Colorado School of Mines
As increasingly more seismologists have access to distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) instruments, either through purchase or through borrowing from community instrumentation facilities, many groups have ‘reinvented the wheel’ for basic DAS data management, visualization and processing software. To help more people use DAS data quickly, to reduce redundant coding effort, and to enable more flexible and reliable tools, we are building the Distributed Acoustic Sensing Data Analysis Ecosystem (DASDAE). The DASCore package is the flagship package of DASDAE, and contains basic utilities for reading many kinds of DAS data formats, objects to manage data with metadata about the experiments, and basic processing and visualization.
We will start out the workshop with discussions of open DAS data and open-source seismic array processing software and DAS software options. We’ll provide an overview of what functionality is provided by DASCore, and how multiple research groups and organizations have been collaborating to develop this community software. This workshop includes a hands-on coding portion, which assumes participants have the following skills in Python:
- Common flow control and logic (if/else, for loops, while loops),
- Write a function.
- Understands classes and objects.
- Use of array indexing.
We hope that this workshop helps new and experienced DAS users get started with this software, that workshop participants will provide us feedback on their experience and needs, and that participants interested in contributing or connecting DASCore with other packages will be able to connect with us and find out how to collaborate moving forward.
Optional Additional Support:
Some limited funding for student participation support will be available for selected participating students who apply. These funds will be provided to selected participants in the form of reimbursement for one night of hotel and one full day of meal expenses at the per diem rates for Baltimore, MD in April 2025. These funds are supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number 2148614, and will be distributed by Colorado School of Mines, so they are restricted to only students who are eligible to receive reimbursements. To apply for these funds, please send an email to dasdae-tutorial@mines.edu by Thursday, February 13 to receive the application link, which must be completed by Friday, February 14.
Students who are not eligible for these funds, early-career members who are not students, and those who need a greater amount of travel support, are encouraged to apply for an Annual Meeting Travel Grant. More information is available at Annual Meeting Travel Grants
Please note: Approval of funding doesn’t guarantee registration. Participants must also register via SSA to attend.
Registration fees:
Price per person includes lunch.
- Students: $35
- Early-Career Members: $50
- Standard: $85
- Non-member: $100
How to Open a Presentation and Foster a Great Q&A
Monday, 14 April 2025, 1:00 – 4:30 PM
An SSA pre-meeting workshop given by Ross S. Stein
Lecturer in Geophysics, Stanford University and Cofounder & CEO, Temblor, Inc.
The ability to present your research in a compelling, concise and engaging manner will enhance your professional career. Taught by communications expert Ross Stein, learn the best way to capture an audience in the opener, leaving a lasting impression in the first few minutes of a talk. Stein will also teach how to respond effectively to questions during and after your presentation.
- Talk Opener: In these crucial opening minutes, you’ve either hooked them or lost them. The goal of a talk is to reveal what you discovered. It’s not to show people how much work you did, how capable and dedicated you are, or how much you know. Your audience doesn’t care about any of those things. Instead, they want to learn something new and important, something that changes their perspective and influences their research. So, use the opening time to explain what you discovered and why it’s important.
- Questions & Answers: The Q&A session can turn into a true discussion, showcasing your maturity and confidence. The key is to pause and give concise replies, and do not feel you have to have all the answers.
In this interactive workshop, Ross will demonstrate four different talk openers: A story, a physical demo, a fight, and an attitude reset. Each attendee will participate by giving a 1 to 2-minute talk opener, without slides, and receive and give group feedback.
About Ross Stein’s Public Speaking Experience
At AGU, Ross has given the Frontiers of Geophysics Lecture, the Francis Birch Lecture, and the Gilbert White Natural Hazards Lecture; he was also 2019 Centennial Lecturer and 2022 College of Fellows Distinguished Lecturer. For GSA, he was the 2018 Distinguished International Lecturer. For SSA, he was 2020 Distinguished Lecturer. He gave a 2012 TEDx talk, ‘Defeating Earthquakes,’ and was 2021 Commencement speaker at U.C. Berkeley Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences. In 2014, Stein was a speaker in MPSF, the nation’s largest community speaking series, with 9,000 listeners over four venues.
Registration fees:
- Students: $35
- Early-Career Members: $50
- Standard: $85
- Non-member: $100
Seismic Instrumentation
Monday, 14 April 2025, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM, lunch included
Instructors: Horst Rademacher, UC Berkeley, ret. and others instructors TBA
In this workshop we will discuss seismic instrumentation by explaining different scales and periods of Earth’s vibrations and the large selection of instrumentation necessary to cover all aspects of Earth’s vibrations. Explore the history of the development of inertial seismometers and what is typically used today. Learn how different kinds of inertial seismometers work and watch a detailed demonstration of a commercial broadband seismometer. Participants will also:
- Delve into evaluation and testing of seismometers.
- Learn some functionalities and use of digitizers and data loggers.
- Focus on metadata, how important are they and how can they be used.
- Learn to install and treat different kinds of seismometers.
Registration fees:
Price per person includes lunch.
- Students: $50
- Early-Career Members: $75
- Standard: $110
- Non-member: $125