The Berkeley Seismological Laboratory conducts essential research on earthquakes and solid earth processes while collecting and delivering high quality geophysical data.
We provide robust and real-time earthquake and hazard information on Northern California earthquakes, in collaboration with our partners.
We enable the broad consumption of earthquake information by the general public while educating and training students at all levels.
Extremely Useful – But Not a Perfect System
After California's Governor Gavin Newsom publicly launched earthquake early warning (EEW) for the Golden State last week, about half a million people downloaded the MyShake app onto their smart phones...
California rolls out first statewide earthquake early warning system
California Gov. Gavin Newsom today (Thursday, Oct. 17) announced the debut of the nation’s first statewide earthquake early warning system that will deliver alerts to people’s cellphones through an app developed at the University of California, Berkeley...
Earthquake Early Warning is Finally Here
It has been several years since the first prototype of an earthquake early warning (EEW) system for the US West Coast proved to be working successfully: A few seconds before the seismic waves of the South Napa Earthquake reached the densely populated San Francisco Bay Area on August 24, 2014, the warning system sounded an alert, albeit only to a few test users...
Barbara Romanowicz awarded the Bowie Medal
AGU’s highest honor, the Bowie medal for "outstanding contributions for fundamental geophysics and for unselfish cooperation in research", is being awarded to Barbara Romanowicz. The medal will be presented at the 2019 fall AGU meeting in San Francisco.
Today in Earthquake History: Hebgen Lake, 1959
Very often it is not a single instant but a chain of events which turn a rare natural occurrence into a devastating natural disaster. One of the prime examples of how much havoc a sequence of events can cause took place sixty years ago today in the area around Hebgen Lake near Yellowstone National Park in southwestern Montana...
It Worked ... and It Did Not!
The magnitude 7.1 quake under the Mojave Desert on Independence Day weekend was the first test of the West Coast wide earthquake early warning system in a really strong shaker – and this system dubbed Shake-Alert performed very well...
Not All is Quiet at the Eastern Front
California is full of famous earthquake faults. Almost everybody in the state has heard of the San Andreas Fault. Northern Californians fear the possible rupture of the Hayward Fault, Angelinos are aware of the Newport-Inglewood Fault and in the far northern reaches of California the major fault line lies offshore marking the subduction zone of the Juan de Fuca and Gorda Plates under North America. To be exact, there are a total of 15,700 known faults in our state. But the strong quakes which rocked the northwestern Mojave Desert around the town of Ridgecrest in the few days following July 4th, 2019, happened on a fault zone almost nobody has ever heard of...
