Geoscience Education and Inclusion
Technical Short Courses
About
Program Overview
In response to the pressing demand for expertise in advanced fields such as earthquake geology, tectonic geodesy, and AI-driven geoscience, CRESCENT will sponsor a series of technical short courses to help train the next generation of geoscientists. These courses will employ modern pedagogy and focus on widely employed research techniques in subduction zone geoscience with practical applications.
Upcoming
Strain Accumulation and Release from GNSS
This three-day virtual short course provides requisite tools for recognizing how earthquake cycle signatures in the Cascadia Subduction Zone are expressed in geodetic observations. It will introduce basic processing of geodetic time series to interpret longer-term strain accumulation processes and slow slip events. It will cover extracting velocities and displacements from geodetic time-series observations and introduce basic inverse methods to use geodetic data to constrain fault slip patterns. The workshop will include a mix of presentations and hands-on tutorials.
June 15-17, 2026
Virtual
Reading the Earthquake Record: A Field Course in Paleoseismology
This five-day, field-based technical short course exposes participants to paleoearthquake studies and their application to understanding fault behavior in space and time. Integrated topics include subsidence stratigraphy, ecology-based paleoseismic studies, tsunami deposit mapping, trench-based paleoseismology, high-resolution lidar topography, and surficial geologic mapping. Based at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology in Charleston, the course includes limited classroom time and 4.5 days of fieldwork in the marshes and adjacent uplands of Coos Bay on Oregon’s southern coast.
August 30-September 5, 2026
Coos County, Oregon
Past
Machine Learning: Building Earthquake Catalogs
This three-day short course provides a hands-on introduction to machine learning techniques for seismic event analysis. Participants will learn to develop AI-aided earthquake catalogs through three key steps: event detection, association, and location with quality control. The course covers neural network architecture selection, model training, performance metrics, and application to continuous seismic data. The workshop will include a mix of presentations and hands-on tutorials.
May 12-14, 2025
Seattle, Washington