Lingsen Meng
Professor of Geophysics
Dept. of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences (EPSS), UCLA
I am a seismologist interested in earthquake source imaging, rupture dynamics, and seismic & tsunami hazards. My research integrates seismic observations, source imaging, numerical simulations, and emerging AI techniques to understand how earthquakes nucleate and rupture — and to build the next generation of earthquake and tsunami early-warning systems.
News
- Jun 2026 Congratulations to Saeed Mohanna on completing his PhD!
- May 2026 New paper in EPSL on swarm cessation and aftershock drivers following the four-year-long Noto Peninsula seismic sequence (Mohanna et al.).
- Dec 2025 Congratulations to Liuwei Xu on completing his PhD!
- Oct 2025 Our study of the 2025 Mw 7.7 Mandalay earthquake — bimaterial effect and favorable energy ratio enabling supershear rupture — published in Science (Xu, Meng et al.).
- Jul 2025 Promoted to Professor of Geophysics at UCLA (effective July 1, 2025).
- Aug 2024 Dual-initiation ruptures of the 2024 Noto earthquake encircling a fault asperity at a swarm edge, published in Science (Xu, Ji, Meng et al.).
- Oct 2023 Rupture of the 2023 Mw 7.8 Kahramanmaraş (Türkiye) earthquake in a millennia supercycle, published in Communications Earth & Environment.
Research
We study how earthquakes start, grow, and stop — and turn that understanding into faster, more reliable hazard monitoring. A few of our core directions:
Rupture dynamics & supershear earthquakes
Imaging how ruptures propagate, branch, and reach supershear speeds in events from Sumatra and Palu to Türkiye and Mandalay.
Seismic array source imaging
Back-projection and MUSIC high-resolution imaging methods, with slowness calibration and 3D extensions.
Tsunami prediction & early warning
Array back-projection and adjoint full-waveform inversion for rapid tsunami source characterization.
Earthquake early warning
Small-scale seismic arrays that track rupture growth and directivity in real time.
Swarms & fluid-driven seismicity
Multiscale fault complexity and hydrothermal processes driving earthquake swarms (Noto, Tengchong).
Slow slip & fault mechanics
Pre-, post-, and independent slow-slip phenomena and their role in earthquake nucleation.
Selected Publications
-
Bimaterial effect and favorable energy ratio enabled supershear rupture in the 2025 Mandalay earthquake ScienceScience 2025
-
Dual-initiation ruptures in the 2024 Noto earthquake encircling a fault asperity at a swarm edge ScienceScience 2024
-
Global frequency of oceanic and continental supershear earthquakes Nature Geosci.Nature Geoscience 2022
-
Early and persistent supershear rupture of the 2018 magnitude 7.5 Palu earthquake Nature Geosci.Nature Geoscience 2019
-
Earthquake in a maze: compressional rupture branching during the 2012 Mw 8.6 Sumatra earthquake ScienceScience 2012
Contact
