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Underwater Volcanoes a Hotbed of Clues to Earth’s Movements
Night view of the JOIDES Resolution, docked in Auckland, New Zealand, before its departure. Credit: D. Buchs, Australian National University.
Nearly half a mile of rock retrieved from beneath the seafloor is yielding new clues about how underwater volcanoes are created and whether the underlying hot spots of molten rock that lead to their formation have moved over time.
Geoscientists have just completed an expedition, part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), to a string of underwater volcanoes, or seamounts, in the Pacific Ocean known as the Louisville Seamount Trail.
There they collected samples of ocean floor sediments, lava flows and other volcanic eruption materials to piece together the Read more…
Stress of Sliding Plates Builds Near Chile
NEAR EPICENTER Concepción, Chile’s second-largest metropolitan area, was badly damaged in last February’s quake.
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
When a magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck off the coast of Chile last February, geophysicists and seismologists were not surprised. The quake’s epicenter was on a roughly 200-mile stretch of a fault where stresses had been building for nearly two centuries, and experts had expected that one day the strain would be relieved in a cataclysmic event.
But as scientists have pored over volumes of data from what may turn out to be the best-studied major earthquake yet, they have concluded that Read more…
Russian volcano activity causes global concern
Now the world has something else to grip about when it comes to Russia – the weather.
A string of volcanoes on Russia’s eastern seaboard of Kamchatka have been unusually active for the last six months. The dust they threw up diverted winds in the Arctic, pushing cold air over Europe and North America and causing the unusually cold winter this year, say scientists.
The volcanoes (160 in total, of which 29 are active) are still on the go and could create more problems this year, depressing harvests around the world just as global food prices soar and Read more…
Scientists warn of new Chilean quake
Rescue workers search for victims and survivors after an apartment complex collapsed during an 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Concepcion on February 27, 2010. Scientists say there is a high risk of a new earthquake in an area of Chile's Pacific coast which was hit by a massive quake and tsunamis last year.
Nearly 500 people were killed when an 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of central Chile triggering a local tsunami in February 2010.
According to the report published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the previous quake had only partly broken stresses, deep in the Earth’s crust in the Chilean city of Concepcion, that have been building up since an 1835 quake witnessed by British naturalist Charles Darwin.
Darwin documented the 1835 earthquake during a five-year voyage.
“We conclude that increased stress on the unbroken patch may in turn have increased the probability of another major to great earthquake there in the near future,” the report read.
Chile’s February quake was the most powerful since the one in 2004 which caused a devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean.
“It’s impossible to predict exactly when a new quake might happen,” Stefano Lorito of Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia told Reuters.
Scientists examined data from tsunamis, satellites and other sources to calculate the Read more…
Seismic fault beneath us is ‘fully loaded’ after 311 years
Julie Muhlstein, Herald Columnist
As if you didn’t have enough worries, here is one more to add to that massive list:
“It’s been 300 years,” Bill Steele said Tuesday. “We have a fully loaded subduction zone.”
Actually, it’s been 311 years since the .
Steele, a University of Washington seismologist and spokesman for the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, said scientists have determined the monster quake occurred Jan. 26, 1700 — 311 years ago tonight.
It happened off the Northwest coast, and created huge tsunamis that devastated shorelines here and in Japan.
What’s amazing is how much is known, considering that in 1700 there were no Europeans in the Northwest. British Capt. George Vancouver wouldn’t find his way here until 1792. The Lewis and Clark Expedition to the West didn’t start until 1804. Historians have no original account of the 1700 quake written from a Western perspective.
“There’s quite a detective story of how we know all that. It’s fantastic,” Steele said.
First, a quick explanation of what happened from the online encyclopedia HistoryLink: Read more…
Tectonic Plates Collapsing under Pakistan and Indonesia – 20 Foot Drop in Shoreline on Java confirmed by Google Satellite
This Picture is Soon to Come Again but this Time it will be with Volcanoes and Earthquakes!
On January 17, 2011, it was reported that the 17,500 Islands Nation of Indonesia was flooding. Here on the Islands of Java, the largest regions of the world’s fourth most populous country, and the largest population of Muslims in the world. This flooding would not seem unusual but experts there reported that there was no reason for the flooding that would account for the submergence of such a large populous area along the sea coastline.
It is true that there had been two weeks of raining in the mountainous regions of Mount Mandiri. Yet, the Chief Social Service NTT Piter Manuk admitted something was unusual. As he reported:
Piter Manuk – “Residents panic was triggered by the arrival of the flood that is considered not reasonable because there are no tributaries that pass through residential areas and for the first time this has happened in the history of Read more…
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