Nancy King, Ph.D.

I am a geophysicist at the USGS Pasadena field office on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, California, working on the SCIGN (Southern California Integrated GPS Network) project. SCIGN is a cooperative project of USGS-Pasadena, JPL , and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

SCIGN's purpose is to use the Global Positioning System (GPS) to measure crustal deformation caused by slip on the many faults of Southern California. This fault slip occurs all the time, at rates of a few millimeters or centimeters per year. The resulting crustal deformation is very small, but we can measure it using the most precise GPS techniques. The SCIGN education page , GPS links and SCIGN links explain how we do this. We then use this measured deformation to infer fault slip and seismic hazard.

In a large earthquake, fault slip of up to several meters occurs all at once. Besides the shaking (felt by people and measured by seismometers), this fault slip also causes permanent deformation of the earth's crust. We measure this deformation with GPS. SCIGN's first large earthquake was the Hector Mine earthquake of October 16, 1999.

Background (1973 - 1997)

1973: B.A., Mathematics, from Revelle College , part of the University of California at San Diego .

1973-1984: U. S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, California. I worked mostly on electronic distance measurement (EDM), which was the most precise way to measure crustal deformation before GPS.

1984-1990: Graduate study in geophysics at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics , part of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography . My Ph.D. thesis was Multiple Taper Spectral Analysis of Earth Rotation Data.

1990-1997: U. S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, California. By this time GPS had replaced EDM. I worked mostly on the Bay Area Regional Deformation (BARD) permanent GPS array.

U. S. Geological Survey Links