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OverviewGeophysical methods and tools are applied to societal issues ranging from oil exploration to earthquake hazards to national defense. At Los Alamos, our understanding of the Earth and the technical capabilities required for observing and conducting experiments enables us to address these challenges and provide solutions to our national needs. For example, global oil exploration is now taking place in regions in which resources are difficult to locate and characterize because of the complexity of the geology overlying the resource. Because drilling in such regions becomes increasingly expensive, geologists need better methods to characterize Earth structures, as well as innovative, less invasive, and more cost-effective drilling methods. Our Geophysics Group has made a significant contribution by developing a technology for inexpensively drilling small boreholes. Also, by emplacing sensors in the drill holes, Los Alamos geophysicists can characterize the Earth through studies of modeling wave propagation. These tools also enable us to predict earthquake hazards in metropolitan areas, with the objective of mitigating the effects of an earthquake. Another important area of seismic research is how explosions interact with geological structures. Not only is this knowledge vital to seismic exploration, it also applies to the identification of defense scenarios and nonproliferation agreements, because the willingness of a nation to restrict or eliminate nuclear testing is influenced by other nations¯ abilities to verify those agreements through seismic observations. Discrimination of earthquakes from chemical or nuclear explosions is a pressing need to government agencies tasked with verifying multinational agreements and treaties. Our study of the dynamic nonlinear elasticity of earth materials is progressing rapidly at both microscopic and macroscopic levels. Our comprehensive theoretical and experimental framework, which is based on experimental and numerical approaches and observation, enables us to predict change in the static and dynamic stress states of materials.
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