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May 17th EAGE-GAIA event: Ylona van Dinther
With the pandemic fading away, EAGE Local Chapter Netherlands in collaboration with GAIA held a live event at Utrecht University on May 17th of 2022 combining a technical talk with the personal experience of Dr. Ylona van Dinther. The event was focused on the understanding and forecasting natural and induced seismicity. Ylona, from the Department of Earth Sciences at Utrecht University, pioneered the bridging of time scales from tectonic time scales (millions of years) down to earthquake time scales (milliseconds to years) in numerical models.
Dr. Ylona van Dinther began her talk with an introduction to earthquake sequences, and she proposed to combine the knowledge from observations and physics-based models. More specifically, her group combined earthquake or tectonics numerical or analytical models with geological and geophysical observations in various ways ranging from using predicting new, verifiable observations; to loose or tight data constraints; to integrating them tightly in a statistically meaningful way. It turned out that the current and future outcomes are important to improve natural and induced earthquake and tsunami hazard assessment. More cool things were also mentioned during Dr. Ylona van Dinther’s talk, such as applying ensemble data assimilation, a statistical method adopted from weather forecasting, to estimate and forecast the state of stress and slip on the fault, comparing natural and induced seismicity, laboratory experiments on Groningen rocks, etc. The audience onsite brought forward many insightful questions. Some were curious about whether AI could help with this problem or not.
In the end, Dr. Ylona van Dinther also shared with the audience her life experiences as a woman in Geosciences. She talked about her career, the steps that brought her into the position she has now and how she balanced work-family-personal lives.
Written by Dong Zhang. Modifications by Andrea Cuesta Cano
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