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How the UK’s tectonic past is key to its seismic present
Today I learnt something very interesting that I didn’t know before – that intraplate earthquakes in the UK mostly occur in western England and Scotland, not Ireland, eastern Scotland or southeast...
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Juno reveals Europa’s evolving surface
About a month ago, NASA’s Juno probe buzzed the Jovian moon Jupiter, and we got this cool picture, taken from a distance of about 400 km away. The icy, fractured surface of the Jovian moon Europa as...
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A deep origin for the Tohoku earthquake?
So if I’m reading this summary in Eos right, there is a new study suggesting that there was significant deformation of the subducted plate in the lead up to the M9 2011 Tohoku earthquake occurred –...
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Just published: can sandbox models be educational and fun?
Just out: a paper by me and education expert Bridget Mulvey grapples with the question: analogue sandbox models are cool, but are they effective teaching tools? Analogue sandbox models are a way of...
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Why do we get earthquakes a long way from plate boundaries?
There’s already a lot of good info out there about this week’s magnitude 5.9 earthquake near Melbourne, Australia. I wanted to dig a little more into the broader reasons you can get earthquakes like...
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Why did North Carolina experience a magnitude 5.1 earthquake yesterday?
The location of this earthquake seems a little odd because North Carolina is about as far as it’s possible to get from an active plate boundary – thousands of km from the mid-Atlantic spreading ridge...
View ArticleMarie Tharp’s Adventures in Mapping the Seafloor, In Her Own Words
Establishing the rift valley and the mid-ocean ridge that went all the way around the world for 40,000 miles…You can’t find anything bigger than that, at least on this planet. Lots of cool science...
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Two reflections on the largest earthquake yet recorded, 60 years later.
It has been 60 years since a magnitude 9.5 earthquake struck the Chilean coast near Valdivia. The stats for this earthquake remain pretty mind-blowing even today. It is still the largest earthquake...
View ArticleAt subduction zones, feeding a complicated plate means you get complicated...
What drives the occurrence of slow-slip events on subduction zones: “earthquakes”: that involve strain release over days and weeks rather than seconds? A new paper…doesn’t really answer that question,...
View ArticleCan we detect plate tectonics on exoplanets?
As celebrated in this Ars Technica piece, the 2010s was ‘the decade of the exoplanet’. Largely thanks to the Kepler telescope, the past ten years has seen an explosion in exoplanet discoveries. More...
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All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again: an...
A few months ago Katie Hinde posted the story she told her anthropology students in the first class of the semester. Eschewing a run-through of the syllabus, she instead illustrated the overarching...
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A Seismic Summary of 2017
Plenty of natural disasters hit the news in 2017, but most of the headlines were hogged by disasters linked to extreme weather, such as Hurricane Harvey. Nonetheless, in the background the Earth’s...
View ArticleVenus stays out in the cold
We basically have a huge generation gap with Venus, and we really need something to launch in the early- to mid-2020s so we can maintain some kind of continuity.” I’m not a planetary scientist, but...
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An unremarkable year – seismically, anyway.
Political pundits seem fond of geological metaphors such as ‘earthquake’, ‘seismic shift’, ‘tectonic shift’ and ‘tsunami’ – and they’ve certainly had plenty of reasons to use such metaphors in the past...
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The geodetic fingerprints of shallow thrusting in Nepal
NASA’s Earth Observatory put out this great image last week, which shows the ground displacement in Nepal resulting from last month’s devastating magnitude 7.8 earthquake, which has claimed at least...
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The Napa Valley quake, and why California is (geologically) not part of...
In the early hours of Sunday morning, the Napa Valley region north of San Francisco was shaken by a magnitude 6 earthquake, the largest to hit this region since the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake...
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Reconstructing ocean spreading when half your record is now in the mantle...
If you’re studying the last 100 million years or so of plate tectonics, the history of sea-floor spreading recorded by the magnetic stripes that parallel and extend away from the Earth’s ocean ridges...
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Antarctica field log: Penguin Island? Surely you mean Volcano Island!
You can tell a trip is going to be pretty special when not only was the site of our first landing in Antarctica called Penguin Island – and we were given reason to believe it was not misnamed – but it...
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Scenic Saturday: our stripy oceans, explained 50 years ago today!
A slightly different Scenic Saturday this weekend, as we celebrate an important milestone in geological science: a look at the South Pacific through a geophysical lens. Magnetic anomalies in the South...
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In large earthquakes, the Earth moves for almost everyone
The Global Positioning System has completely revolutionised how geologists study the deformation of the Earth. If you leave a GPS receiver in a fixed location for days, months and years, it is precise...
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