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2015 GSA International Distinguished Lecturer Tours Key Locations
in Central and South America
GSA TODAY | JULY 2016 Lisa L. Ely, Central Washington University
As the International Lecturer from North America, I visited
11 destinations in Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and
Puerto Rico. The tour was designed to include locations where the
topic of my presentation, “Following in the Footsteps of Darwin:
Combining Geological and Historical Evidence to Assess
Earthquakes and Tsunami Hazards,” would have direct relevance.
Lisa Ely presents her GSA International Lecture at the Universidad Católica ical observations by Darwin, FitzRoy, and others into geological
del Perú.
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Charles Darwin joined the 1831–1836 expedition on The H.M.S.
Beagle as “a young man of promising ability, extremely fond of
geology, and indeed all branches of natural history” (FitzRoy,
1839, p. 18). Darwin and the ship’s captain, Robert FitzRoy,
documented coseismic land-level changes and tsunami inunda-
tion following the great Chilean earthquake of 1835 (Darwin,
1839; FitzRoy, 1839). My GSA lecture described the results of
seven years of research with colleagues studying past earth-
quakes and tsunamis in Chile, in which we incorporated histor-
investigations of paleoseismic features such as tsunami deposits,
microfossils, and uplifted shoreline platforms (Ely et al., 2014;
Wesson et al., 2015).
The lecture tour was far from a one-way communication of
research results. Many of the locations on my 2015 tour contend
with potentially destructive earthquakes and volcanoes, as in
Costa Rica and Chile, and institutions there are at the forefront of
research into the geological processes inherent to tectonically
active regions. In southern Chile, I had the opportunity to accom-
pany researchers and students from the Universidad Austral to an
Andean lake to acquire reflection-seismic profiles and extract
cores of lacustrine turbidite sequences that could reflect shaking
during large interplate earthquakes (Moernaut et al., 2014). At the
Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, I spoke at the IV Congress of
Physical Oceanography, Meteorology and Climate. The meeting
included for the first time an all-day session devoted to Pacific
Ocean tsunamis. This brought together researchers from a variety
of fields and agencies throughout Chile to discuss the means to
share their data across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.
As a professor at a regional university, I am particularly inter-
ested in the educational approaches of universities of various
types and sizes. A recurring theme at many universities in Latin
America is the expansion of the geology curriculum beyond the
traditional emphasis on mining and natural resources to include
environmental geology, natural hazards, and climate change.
These new directions are largely grassroots efforts by faculty in
response to regional needs and student opportunities, and they
have generated a palpable influx of energy into the departments.
At the Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima, the newly intro-
duced undergraduate emphasis in geology within the major in
geological engineering has attracted a crew of eager students.
The Centro de Investigación en Gestión de Riesgos y Cambio
Climático at the Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas,
Mexico, was developed to investigate the management of geolog-
ical hazards of direct relevance to the local region, including active
volcanoes, seismicity, and flooding. Faculty members, students,
and I toured field sites of student projects in fluvial and coastal
processes complete with a fat alligator resting at the base of an
otherwise promising stratigraphic section of flood deposits.
At every destination on this tour, I was impressed with the
preparation and enthusiasm of the students. Two universities