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A mountain (meta)geologist
As you might have noticed, my blogging has been a little thin on the ground recently, which means I have been remiss in pointing you to some sterling posts from fellow All-geo blogger Simon Wellings,...
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Friday Focal Mechanisms: South Australian shaking keeps Chris guessing
Rather annoyingly, I’ve actually been unable to find a focal mechanism for the magnitude 5.2 earthquake that shook the state of Victoria in southeast Australia on Tuesday. Although there were no...
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Hotspot volcanism on Hawaii: textbook vs reality
Just like an iceberg, the parts of the Hawaiian Islands that you see above the ocean surface are dwarfed in volume by the stuff below the waves. For a start, any volcano that forms in the middle of the...
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AGU Dispatches: Superchrons and subduction
I started the day with my paleomagician’s hat on, sitting in on a session looking at the long term behaviour of the Earth’s dynamo. Changes in the strength and reversal frequency of the Earth’s...
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AGU Dispatches: Final Day and Final Thoughts
Unless you are presenting, the final day of a 5 day-conference can be a test of your intellectual fortitude: it can be tough to force your tired and stuffed-with-cool-new-science brain to take an...
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Friday Focal Mechanism: the Himalayas’ long tectonic shadow
It wasn’t the biggest seismic event of the week, but this shallow (15 km depth) magnitude 6.0 that shook the remote southeast corner of Kazakstan on Monday still caught my attention. Location and...
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Friday Focal Mechanisms: before and after the M8 Santa Cruz Islands quake
On Tuesday night American time (Wednesday lunchtime local time), a magnitude 8 earthquake occurred near the Santa Cruz Islands, a set of small islands east of the Solomon Islands. In this region, the...
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A week of big earthquakes in Iran
Squashed and squeezed between the Eurasian continent to the north and the northward-moving Arabian plate to the south, it is no surprise that Iran is a seismically active country, and in the past week...
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Echoes of Wenchuan: magnitude 6.6 earthquake shakes Sichuan province in west...
On Saturday morning local time (Friday evening for us in the USA), a magnitude 6.6 earthquake shook up Sichuan province in western China, about 35 km north of the closest city, Ya’an, and 115km west of...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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...
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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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...
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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...
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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