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The KeckCAVES - UC Davis' scientific 'holodeck'

Published in The Aggie on April 18, 2007

Early on the morning of Apr. 19, 1892, most of northern California and west-central Nevada felt the trembling rumble of an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.5 on the Richter scale at its center.

Vacaville, Allendale, Dixon and Winters were shaken so tremendously that buildings shifted off their foundations and collapsed or were wrenched apart. Nearly all brick structures crumbled and mile-long ground fissures split the earth.

The recurrence of a similar quake today, 115 years later, would have the potential to threaten our vastly more populated cities with damages possibly exceeding a cost of $500 million.

But now a new tool at UC Davis is giving researchers new insight into geological phenomena.

The W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences, or KeckCAVES for short, gives geologists and other earth scientists the ability to research and explore earthquake zones and a multitude of other topics with cutting-edge technology.

Installed on campus in April 2005, this three-dimensional, virtual-reality environment immerses scientists in their work like a "Star Trek" holodeck. Operating somewhat like Google Earth, the technology incorporates a digital elevation model that allows researchers to 'fly' in real time over terrain models of Earth's surface and interior.

The KeckCAVES interactive tools and environment provide scientists with an effective means of organizing, manipulating and interpreting large and complex volumes of data.

Not just limited to earthquake science, geology professor Dawn Sumner uses the KeckCAVES in her study of the evolution of bacteria. She examines ancient microbial communities in rocks 2.5 to 3 billion years old.

"A 3D picture is necessary to see the orientation of and distance between their delicate, threadlike structures," Sumner said. "The difficulty is that they're encased in rock."

KeckCAVES technology allows Sumner and her colleagues to stack layers of microscopic photographs and create an accurate 3D picture of a microbial community's structure. From these 3D pictures, Sumner can take detailed measurements that aid her understanding of this early life form.

Scientists focusing on earthquakes work interactively with a code called Virtual California, a simulation of all of California's interacting faults.

By using the KeckCAVES, researchers are able to look at space-time patterns of stresses, strains, displacements and the like.

According to the "Earthquake Physics" research synopsis at keckcaves.ucdavis.edu, scientists "propose to simulate earthquakes over a greater than 106-year period to lay the basis for numerical forecasting technology" not unlike current methods of forecasting weather and climate.

If successful, such a program could greatly minimize the damage of a recurrent earthquake like the devastating 1892 Vacaville-Winters quake.

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