The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has presented UC Santa Cruz postdoctoral scholar Will Steinhardt with its 2024 Jason P. Morgan Early Career Award honoring outstanding and significant contributions to tectonophysics through a combination of research, education, and outreach activities.
Tectonophysics is the branch of geophysics that deals with the forces that cause movement and deformation in the Earth's crust, over distances ranging from meters to thousands of kilometers. Steinhardt, in the Earth & Planetary Sciences (EPS) Department at UC Santa Cruz, focuses on innovative lab experiments that serve as analogs of earthquakes. His work on geological instabilities brings a powerful portfolio of experimental techniques from applied physics to bear on geophysical problems, according to Steinhardt’s supervisor, EPS professor Emily Brodsky.
At UC Santa Cruz, Steinhardt has tackled the problem of relating rupture observables to physical processes. Geophysics relies on standard parameterizations from the 1970s to infer physics from earthquakes, based on some scaling analyses and more recent numerical modeling. But this approach doesn’t allow for direct imaging and simulation of physical ruptures in real materials over multiple cycles, according to Brodsky.
"I am interested in problems that impact humans directly, like earthquakes and fractures. The complexity of these natural systems is inextricable from their observed behavior, and my goal in using novel experimental approaches is to build deeper physical intuition for how that complexity drives these systems towards or away from failure,” Steinhardt said. “Hopefully, this will allow us to better predict or engineer against these hazards and reduce their risk.”
Steinhardt has designed and built a transparent experiment that can image deformation throughout a 2-D rupture surface over time, and thus, may have solved this problem. “This experiment is a brand-new capability that allows us to probe fundamental earthquake mechanics questions such as the role of mesoscale structures in controlling the speed and size of ruptures,” Brodsky stated in her nomination to AGU’s award committee.
“He has the skills and insights to make this hybrid approach result in geological advances on the physical origins of some of our most perplexing observables,” “said Brodsky, a leading earthquake physicist in the field. “He is one of the most creative and skilled scientists it has ever been my pleasure to interact with. In addition, he is an award-winning mentor and a superb communicator.”
Indeed, Steinhardt has proven to be an inspiring mentor, even though it’s well beyond his scope of work as a postdoc. He has been awarded UC Santa Cruz’s Koret mentor award and took on undergraduate research interns as soon as campus COVID restrictions once again allowed for in-person attendance.
“He is defining a new area of research and is clearly the leader in bringing analog methods to earthquake problems,” Brodsky concluded in her nomination. “I suspect we are just at the beginning. Will is at the center of a new field that he is growing by his own work, as well as his mentoring of the next generation who are already following in his footsteps.”
Steinhardt joins a distinguished group of scientists, leaders and communicators recognized by AGU for advancing science. Each honoree reflects AGU's vision for a thriving, sustainable and equitable future supported by scientific discovery, innovation and action.
Honorees will be recognized in December at AGU24, which will convene more than 25,000 attendees from over 100 countries in Washington, D.C. and online everywhere. Reflecting the theme “What's Next for Science” at AGU24, the awards ceremony will recognize groundbreaking achievements that illustrate science's continual advancement.
