Professor Chi Y. Wang
407 McCone Hall
Phone (510) 642-2288
Fax (510) 643-9980
chiyuen@seismo.berkeley.edu

Professor Chi Y. Wang received his Bachelor degree in geology from the Taiwan National University in 1958. Following two years of manditory military training in Taiwan, he came to the U.S. in 1960 for graduate education under Francis Birch at Harvard University where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1964.

From 1964 to 1967, he worked at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory as a geophysicist to study the earth's gravitational field using the then newly available artificial satellite data. During this time he hypothesized that the earth's 'excess' oblateness (in excess of its hydrostatic shape) was a result of its delayed response to the sudden disappearance of the ice-caps following the last ice age - a hypothesis that has since been largely sustained by later studies.

Since 1967 he has been a faculty member of the department of Earth & Planetary Science at UC Berkeley. He studied the earth's density using the then newly available data for the earth's free oscillations and, at the same time, he set up a high-pressure laboratory in the department to study the seismic-wave velocity and the mechanical property of rocks under high pressure. Since the late 1980's, he and his students have applied information on rock's mechanical property to study regional-scaled tectonic and transport processes, using numerical simulation as a tool.

Currently Professor Wang continues to try to understand the earth's tectonic processes using large-scaled numerical simulation as a tool.
He and his collaborators have simulated the mountain-building processes in Taiwan, faulting in the San Francisco Bay area, and hydrological phenomena associated with recent large earthquakes. Specifically, they are trying to distinquish between two current hypotheses on mountain-building, i.e., the thin-skinned (simple-shear) and the crustal thickening (pure-shear) hypotheses, to examine whether or not a master detachment fault may exist beneath the San Francisco Bay area, and to determine what mechanism may best explain the widespread hydrologic response in Taiwan during the 1999
Chi-Chi (M=7.5) earthquake. The answers to these questions, in addition to their academic significance, may also have practical ramification towards a better means of earthquake hazard reduction.