All of these earthquakes that have occurred recently, in Haiti, Chile, Turkey and now today just south of the U.S. border in Mexico
These are what are called plate boundary earthquakes. The earth is made up of several tectonic plates that are moving
either away from each other or toward each other all the time and as a result, those that are moving toward each other
can produce large earthquakes because they're under compression and a lot of friction and a lot of elastic energy gets released.
Here in the Eastern U.S., we don't really know the cause of the earthquakes. We're not on a plate boundary.
We do not know actually why the earthquakes occur in any plate interior.
If we did have a magnitude six point five earthquake, a lot of buildings would be heavily damaged.
A lot of them would be destroyed. It would be hazardous to people who live here.
So it isn't that we are engineers or anything. We're not going to redesign buildings.
But what we're doing will have a direct barring on future building design and that sort of thing, by engineers.
So it's important in that regard too. It has a direct impact on the region.
This also has a barring on the health and safety of the people that live in this region.
It isn't just the UT community. It's the whole region that we're dealing with here.
One of the basic goals of the university, is to conduct research
and to produce research that would be significant in the overall theme of, why do scientific research.