Anne Sheehan, professor of geophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder, plans to shake things up at the Louisville Public Library with her presentation, “Earthquakes! Far Away and Close to Home,” at 7 p.m., Wednesday, April 18 at the Louisville Public Library, 951 Spruce Street. The event is free and open to the public.

Sheehan is also a fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and her tectonic research has included work in the Himalaya, New Zealand, the Colorado Rocky Mountains, and the Rio Grande Rift .

“Earthquakes are used as signals to image the subsurface structure and to study earthquakes source characteristics,” Sheehan said. “I have started to use GPS (global positioning system) as a tool to measure how the Earth’s surface is moving very slowly. I have a major GPS field campaign going on right now in Colorado and New Mexico, and we hope the learn whether the Rocky Mountains and Rio Grande Rift are tectonically active today.”

Earlier this year, Sheehan and colleagues from the CIRES, University of New Mexico, New Mexico Tech, Utah State University, and the Boulder-headquartered UNAVCO, reported the Rio Grande Rift, a thinning stretch of the Earth’s surface that extends from the Colorado’s central Rocky Mountains to Mexico, is not dead but geologically active. Scientists were not surprised by the earthquake that struck in August 2011 near Trinidad, Colo., which is in the Rio Grande Rift area.

The April 18 program is part of a series called CU at the Library, which is jointly sponsored by the Louisville Public Library and the CU-Boulder Office for University Outreach. It is one of several 2011-2012 programs that were offered throughout the 2011-2012 academic year. For more information, visit http://conted.colorado.edu/library/