TAHOE, Calif. and#8212; Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences, 291 Country Club Drive, Incline Village, Wednesday, Oct. 5, 5:30 p.m. no-host bar. Program begins at 6 p.m., $5 donation requested. Recent advances in both airborne and terrestrial LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technologies allow imaging of Lake Tahoe landforms in a completely different light (pardon the pun). In 2010, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency and partners funded the first airborne LiDAR survey of the Tahoe basin, providing an amazing dataset to explore landforms.

This technology allows the user to strip away trees (or study the canopy) to reveal an amazing picture of unheralded clarity (sub-meter horizontal and 3.5 centimeter vertical resolution). Active faults, landslides and other landforms jump off the screen, enabling discoveries such as the landward extension of basin-forming faults (e.g. West Tahoe and Incline Village faults). Paleo-landslides abound. Together with Sonar mapping in the lakes of the Tahoe basin, the first true baseline of the basin is recorded. A brief update of the Great California and Nevada ShakeOut will also be discussed.

Dr. Graham M. Kent is the director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory and professor in the Department of Geological Sciences and Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno. Previous to July 2009, Graham was a research geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and was Director of the Visualization Center at Scripps. Dr. Kent is a native of Lake Tahoe, Calif. where he graduated from South Tahoe High School in 1980.

Upcoming events include Oct. 20, Harvest Festival and Chamber Mixer, Tahoe City Field Station and Oct. 20, Masters of the Night Bat Lecture, with Mary Jean and#8220;Corkyand#8221; Quirk, NorCal Bats, Tahoe City Field Station. Visit http://terc.ucdavis.edu/calendar/ for additional information.

and#8212; Submitted to aedgett@sierrasun.com