Professor Gerald Roberts

Research news

Mission to Mars: InSIGHT, a UK Space Agency and NASA project to place a seismometer on Mars.

29th October 2012

Prof. Gerald Roberts has been asked to be part of funded mission, led by Dr. Tom Pike at Imperial, to land a seismometer on Elysium Planitia, Mars, close to a system of large faults that may be active in that region. (InSIGHT: STFC ST/K006037/1). Prof. Roberts will be advising on potential seismic sources on Mars. The mission launch is set for 2016. For more information see:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19327286

New earthquake hazard grant

29th October 2012

Prof. Gerald Roberts is part of a newly funded consortium to study
Probability, Uncertainty and Risk in the Natural Environment (NERC NE/J016497/1). This multi-million pound grant, led by Dr. Richard Chandler at UCL (PI) involves research into earthquakes, windstorms, volcanoes and other hazards, in collaboration with a number of universities (UCL, Edinburgh, Reading, Oxford, Durham, Imperial). The ideas is to grow cross-disciplinary approaches to quantification of uncertainty in risk assessments. Prof. Roberts is the Birkbeck PI and will be studying Probability, Uncertainty and Risk associated with research on major earthquakes in taly and Greece.

Conferment of Title: Professor of Earthquake Geology

October 1st 2012

Gerald Roberts has become a Professor of Earthquake Geology, and Head of Department. Gerald wishes to thank his collaborators for helping him to achieve this - thanks, you know who you are.

Marsquakes paper published

23rd February 2012

Dr Roberts has published a new paper on Marsquakes in Journal of Geophysical Research. This paper has been discussed in a Research Highlights section of Nature Geosciences, and is now the subject of articles on thousands of websites including Time Magazine, New Scientist, ABC news, Fox news etc.....(try a Google search for "Gerald Roberts Marsquakes").

http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2012/2012-09.shtml

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n2/full/ngeo1396.html

NERC Grant award to Gerald Roberts on earthquake geology

Dr Gerald Roberts has been awarded a £888,983 NERC Grant to study "Earthquake hazard from cosmogenic 36‐Cl exposure dating of elapsed time and Coulomb stress transfer".

Gerald is the lead scientist and will conduct and manage the research in central Italy, which is to be spread across Birkbeck, UCL, Durham University, Leeds University, the University of Ulster, the Scottish Universities Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Facility, the National Institute of Geophysics in Rome (INGV), the Italian Geological Survey and the National Oceanographic and Geophysics Observatory in Trieste.