The Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences is now part of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
This page is currently being maintained for archival purposes only. For the latest information, please visit us here.
Distinguished Lecture Series
November 13, 2013
A Beautiful, Hazardous Haven: The Shaping of the Santa Cruz Mountains
Wednesday, November 20, 2013 • 4:15 P.M.
Huang Engineering Center – Mackenzie Room
A reception will follow the lecture.
The Santa Cruz Mountains provide the scenic backdrop to the Stanford campus, contribute to a pleasant climate, and preserve large swaths of land for outdoor recreation in an urban environment. Prof. George Hilley will explore the various pieces of evidence that reveal how these mountains were built, and how the Peninsular Bay Area was sculpted by the interaction of these processes with a changing climate. He will address how the slow action of long-lived Earth processes impact daily lives by shaping a beautiful environment while simultaneously creating substantial seismic risk to the large population and thriving industries in the Bay Area.
George Hilley is associate professor in the Stanford Department of Geological & Environmental Sciences. He studies the landscape’s response to active faulting and folding of the Earth’s crust over a broad range of time and spatial scales, from the development of mountain ranges over millions of years through the development of small landforms and watersheds over tens to hundreds of thousands of years.
