Featured Careers: Geology
The Earth and Environmental Sciences Division houses the Laboratory’s Geology and Geophysics departments. The division is truly an exciting place to work, as scientists delve into advanced computational earth sciences, climate and ecosystem science, hydrology, and the study and modeling of earth’s processes and materials.
Geophysicists perform research using seismology, infrasound, ground-shock modeling and acoustics to address critical needs in energy, seismic hazards, threat detection and reduction, earthquake prediction and subsurface imaging.
Key projects
- Applied seismology: evaluation of seismic wave generation and propagation, analysis of critically stressed faults, earthquake triggering, and global seismic monitoring
- Elasticity, Vibrations, and Acoustics (EVA) Laboratory: acoustic and elastic waves for material characterization, material integrity and nondestructive evaluation, porous media characterization in high pressure fluid environments, full 3D waveform measurements using laser vibrometry, imaging and developing advanced ultrasonic techniques using time reversal and nonlinear elasticity
- Geologic framework model development
- Numerical modeling: high strain-rate shock propagation, multi-scale analysis of the crustal state of stress
- Seismic and acoustic imaging: inversion theory, seismic and acoustic tomography
What employees say about their careers in geology and geophysics at the Lab
"Los Alamos National Laboratory is a premier institution where dreams become reality. Hailing from rural Ethiopia and arriving at Los Alamos by way of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio in the late 1980s, the Laboratory provided me opportunities and challenges as a geoscientist, working on diverse, real-world problems related to waste disposal, environmental cleanup, critical resources evaluation and basic sciences research. As a winner of the Fellows Prize in 2001 and Laboratory Fellow in 2010, the Lab’s scientific reputation and excellent work environment greatly enhanced my scientific career." Gidday W. –
"Many scientific challenges in the field of earth and environmental sciences are very complex, and making significant progress towards resolving them requires combining expertize across traditional boundaries between disciplines. What I enjoy most about my work at Los Alamos is the focus on the scientific question and finding best means for resolving it among all the expertise and technical resources available, most of which can even be found on site from fields as diverse as microbiology, geology, ecology, materials science and high power computing. The interdisciplinary working culture and incredible technical resources make such work very enjoyable and fruitful here." Sanna S. –
Interested in a career with us?
We invite you to consider a career in the geology and geophysics. Explore more about the work we are doing in Earth and Environmental Science.
