Active Tectonicist: Professor Roland Bürgmann

When Roland Bürgmann started his PhD at Stanford in the Fall of 1989, he expected to build on his structural geology studies in Boulder, CO and Tübingen, Germany. He was thinking about how to map extinct faults and model how they formed, particularly up in the Sierras. “Then, two months after I arrived, the Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed our building” and gave him a different project. (By the time the Stanford Geology Corner reopened five years later, Bürgmann was already an assistant prof at UC Davis.) Geophysicist Paul Segall was an early adopter of GPS receivers, and he and a group of students “ran up to the Santa Cruz mountains and took measurements.” Tracking “post-earthquake transient deformations” and the mechanics of fault systems was a new capability, and it became the topic of a chapter of Bürgmann’s PhD thesis. He thinks this new research direction “ultimately led to me getting hired” by Earth & Planetary Sciences here at UC Berkeley. A combination of new technology, an earthquake, and Bürgmann happened at just the right time. 

This compact origin story contains most of the features that Professor Bürgmann wants to get across. “Sometimes I’m a geophysicist, or a geologist, or maybe a geodesist,” depending on the problem at hand, “but I don’t want to be defined by the tools I use.” He picks up whatever he needs. Still, “without GPS and remote sensing satellite radar systems, I wouldn’t be where I am, right? I came at just the right time to partake in the revolution of being able to see the earth move with millimeter accuracy.” 

Gathering and analyzing these new kinds of data has shifted the base of earthquake-cycle deformation studies from being an inferential practice to an observational one. As in all physical sciences, the ideal procedure is to collect data first and then figure out how it can be used to understand, predict, and perhaps to control. History shows that starting out with a theory may get you moving quickly, but it can end up limiting the directions the data takes you. Professor Bürgmann started out interested in understanding faults, used the new techniques available to collect data, and found that “there are four other topics and surprising observations that you didn't expect, right?” An example? “Landslides right here in north Berkeley. We were looking at the Hayward Fault, and our radar data shows these little red blobs that turn out to be actively moving landslides, which we published in Science, and this has turned into a pretty significant and enduring direction of current research, since that was one of the first times we’ve been able, y’know, to see that.” The progress multiplier here at UC Berkeley EPS is how we integrate distinct disciplines to better understand an entire system. Our department succeeds through collaborations. It’s an emphasis in our strategic planning and in hiring  “people who can link, who are at the interfaces.”

Plate tectonics was the big paradigm shift in earth science, only as recently as the 1960s. The shift that Professor Bürgmann has been riding is “to be able to see plate tectonics in real time, in action – a completely different way of looking at the Earth.” From month to month, we can track a fault slipping and plates moving. Now we have a whole new view of how faults behave, giving “a much more dynamic picture.” His research program is titled Active Tectonics. Our understanding of the entire earthquake cycle is progressing, but the general public wants to know if we can predict them. The answer is still no. “But forecasting is very solid.” Earthquakes are more chaotic than, say, volcanoes, but being able to give a probability of a rupture in the next 30 years, a forecast, – “that’s useful to influence building codes, but it’s not prediction.” This might bug the general public, but not Bürgmann. “Our understanding of the physics of earthquakes is rapidly growing” and that is a positive outcome in itself. 

The effort to strike a balance between pure and applied research also shows in Roland Bürgmann’s teaching. More than half the students in a breadth-requirement course, Earthquakes in Your Backyard, are from business or the humanities, “so it’s a fine line you walk in terms of what you’re hoping to accomplish.” He has had great success post-Covid with an online version that provides practical value in addition to knowledge and methodology. They come out with a fair bit of science as well as preparation for hazardous earthquakes. Bürgmann shares the joy he discovered as a student. “I don’t consider what we [scientists] do a job. So long as I could get by, I would do this if I didn’t get paid for it.” He admired that joy in his Colorado and Stanford advisors, and tries to pass it along to the next generation. He’s also passionate about trail running and still does ultramarathons for fun. Bürgmann takes his research group to run a trail race every year, followed by an Active Tectonics BBQ in his backyard. 

For this coming year, Bürgmann will be using a Miller Institute award to look for data that might shed light on the folk-wisdom notion of ‘earthquake weather.’ Does the changing climate have some effect on the occurrence of earthquakes? Are the atmosphere and the solid earth completely separate systems? What can we learn about the physics of faults from this interaction? Maybe shifts in the climate have something to teach us about forecasting earthquakes. First, though, comes the exploration of relevant geophysical data. 

Roland Bürgmann wraps up with a smile. “When I was younger, I had a lot of jobs: busboy, mailman, driver, lumberjack. I was always looking at my watch, wanting the work to go by so that I could enjoy my free time. Now I never do that. That’s pretty lucky.” 

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