At 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,...
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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 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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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...
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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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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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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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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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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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