EAS Seminar: Tolulope Olugboji (Rochester)
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Snee Hall, 2146, Tompkins
Ocean Sound as a Probe of Earth and Environment: Toward a Global, Underwater Map of Earthquake Loudness The ocean’s sound field is a continuous, passive record of the solid Earth and its environment. It already tracks deep-ocean warming through seismic thermometry, detects earthquakes with drifting hydrophones, and carries the calls of whales and the health of marine ecosystems. Sound is the one signal that carries it all. Yet one question remains unanswered at a global scale: what governs the loudness of a submarine earthquake in the ocean? This talk describes how we study that coupling, from the earthquake source to the seafloor, to the sound crossing the ocean. Using a decade of records from five hydroacoustic arrays across three ocean basins, we show that this coupling follows tectonics, not just earthquake size, and that it is globally predictable. The result is the first global map of Earth’s natural acoustic amplifiers: stable corridors where the seafloor turns seismic energy into sound efficiently, year after year, offering a new window into the tectonic structures that shape it. I close by placing this map in a bigger effort to monitor the ocean’s full geological soundscape, starting with an acoustic energy budget for submarine volcanoes built on the same pipeline. I will also preview early work that uses this global catalog to train algorithms telling earthquakes apart from volcanoes, landslides, and human activity in the ocean’s sound. Together, these threads point toward a new kind of observatory: one that listens to the whole ocean and turns its natural acoustic amplifiers into a standing probe of Earth and its environment. Bio: Tolulope M. Olugboji is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, with a secondary appointment in the Department Electrical and Computer Engineering and an affiliation with the Goergen Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, at the University of Rochester. He leads the Olugboji Planetary Imaging and Earth Hazards Lab (URseismo), which combines ocean-bottom and global seismic network data with high-performance computing and machine learning to image the structure of Earth’s interior and probe natural hazards, spanning the lithosphere and upper mantle, marine geophysics, and seismo-acoustic signal processing. He received his Ph.D. in geology and geophysics from Yale University (2014), following an M.Phil. at Yale and a B.Sc. in computer science from Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria, and held postdoctoral and visiting research positions at the University of Maryland and Rutgers University before joining Rochester in 2018. His research is supported by an NSF CAREER Award (2024), and he has been recognized with a Carnegie Visiting Fellowship (2022) and a Next Einstein Fellowship from the Robert Bosch Foundation (2017–2019).