Ken Smith

Nevada’s Earthquake Team

When a big earthquake hits anywhere in Nevada and eastern California, Ken Smith and the team at the Nevada Seismological Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno, immediately analyze
the lab’s data and update federal, state and local emergency management authorities. They are on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“Many are overnight so we get buzzed and receive text messages and emails from a number of the network’s automatic systems,” Smith said. “We get woken up in the middle of the night. We have to get on our data center computers and see what impact the event may have had and ensure all of our earthquake response products make it to the right people.”

As the Nevada Seismic Network Manager, Smith oversees a technical team and a network of more than 150 stations in Nevada and Eastern
California, including the Lake Tahoe Basin. With large earthquakes, they access the Lab’s seismic waveform data and refine the automatic location and magnitude of the earthquake. The lab not only
conducts seismological research and data analysis, it’s also a member of a national consortium of universities and government agencies monitoring earthquakes nationwide called the United States
Geological Survey (USGS) Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS).

“We do research to better understand the region’s seismic hazards but the Nevada Seismic Network also has a big service and public safety role for the state that takes priority over everything we do,” Smith said. “If there’s a large event we have to respond, everything else takes second priority.”

Smith manages the statewide network but he said the Lake Tahoe Basin is an important area to monitor for earthquakes. Tahoe has been shaped by repeated earthquakes on major faults in the basin.
The three main systems are the West Tahoe-Dollar Point, Stateline-North Tahoe and the Incline Village fault zones. To Smith and other seismologists the evidence for big fault ruptures in the past is clear. There will be large seismic events in the Tahoe Basin, but no one knows when the next one will be.

“Eventually there’s going to be a big earthquake,” Smith said. “And there are other looming issues such as landslides, possible tsunami run-ups, the kinds of natural hazards that regional planners and emergency responders are addressing. On any given day, summer or winter, the basin can be packed with visitors so a large earthquake will present enormous challenges.”

Smith said to better monitor Tahoe, the USGS is supporting the upgrade of the lab’s seismograph stations. They have good reason to monitor the area. Smith and the lab have detected very deep earthquakes under North Lake Tahoe that he said are most likely related to magma movements deep in the crust. It underscores the fact that Lake Tahoe is tectonically active today.

“Some of these older stations have been operating since the ‘80s,” he said. “It would be like trading in your analog phone for a smartphone. We’ll have a much better view of the earthquakes at
Tahoe when this project is complete.”