Lekic is now one of five alumni faculty members who
have received the award while at this university, and he will be given access
to unrestricted funds of $875,000 over a five-year period to support his
extensive research on Earth’s inner structure.
Now that a large fund has been granted to his work,
he hopes to spend more time plotting the seismic information in graphs and
models so that he may better understand the Earth, Lekic said.
Lekic's past accomplishments fuel his future endeavors in redefining seismic technology.
Lekic has already used the seismic information to
investigate why and how the crust moves over the Earth’s mantle. As of now, the
deepest any machine has been able to dig was about 12 kilometers into the
Earth’s crust, a minuscle fracture of the roughly 6,730 kilometers it takes to
get to the Earth’s core. Using the seismic information helps geologists see the
shapes and sizes of the Earth’s layers.
Lekic has received several other early career
awards besides the Packard Fellowship.
In recognition of his efforts to integrate computer
science and geological studies, Lekic joined the ranks of 17 other early career
U.S. scientists and engineers who were awarded a Packard Fellowship for Science
and Engineering last week.
Lekic’s research is based on ground vibration
recordings, which he and his students use to detect the scattering of seismic
waves across the North American tectonic plate. In conjunction with the
National Science Foundation’s EarthScope Facility network, the data is
collected from the 49 states and Puerto Rico and makes up about 3.8 million
square miles, Lekic said.
As a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkley, Lekic
formulated higher-resolution images of the Earth’s mantle structure, stemming
from his creation of a global seismic velocity model. Not only is the model
able to give geologists a better understanding of plate tectonics, but it also
helps explain the movement of continental plates and their evolution, Lekic
said.
From this data, Lekic is creating a map that will
not only cover all 48 contiguous states, Alaska and Puerto Rico, but also dive
deep into the Earth’s crust and core.
Breaking research in the field of neutrino geoscience demonstrates a new way to analyze the earth and its layers.
Other than his seismology research contributions,
Lekic is also a forerunner in the new geological field of neutrino geoscience.
Neutrinos are a type of electrically neutral
subatomic particle that are created during radioactive decay or some kinds of
nuclear reactions. The particle, which was only discovered geologically in 2005
and physically
detected for the first time last year, moves through every kind of object,
McDonough said.
“It sounds magical; it’s like a particle that
exists but you can’t really see,” Lekic said of neutrinos.
Lekic's plan to map out the earth is analogous to an ultrasound and will allow researchers to "see through" the earth.
Lekic and McDonough are attempting to harness that
energy to create another way to build a model of the Earth.
“What we do is comparable to how an ultrasound
let’s us see through our bodies,” Lekic said. “But this lets us see through the
Earth.”
Nearly 2 million data lines fill the screen of
Vedran Lekic’s computer every day, each representing seismic waves that are
detected from of the more than 1,700 seismic stations around the U.S.
“We are both interested in the energy that moves the tectonic plates and
creates the magnetic shield around the planet,” geology professor William
McDonough said.
“EarthScope is kind of like our Apollo mission, but
not as costly,” Lekic said.
