Free Republic

California's supervolcano that has the power to bury Los Angeles in more than 3,000 feet of ash is showing signs of activity. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) identified over 2,000 earthquakes rumbling throughout the Long Valley Caldera in recent years. The team conducted a new investigation to see if the seismic activity was a sign of impending doom or that the risk of a massive eruption was decreasing. Caltech researchers created detailed underground images of the caldera, finding that the recent seismic activity results from fluids and gases released as the area cools off and settles down....

Reporter’s notebook: OPB science reporter Jes Burns shares a strange tale of “crabotage” that emerged as scientists aboard the research vessel Thompson tried to answer complicated questions about the Axial Seamount. Being out on the research vessel Thompson in the middle of the ocean means never really hearing the ocean at all. There’s engine noise and exhaust blowers and climate control and winches and wind — but very few actual waves. Being out on a research ship 250 miles away from land means the science never stops. It’s a 24-7 buzz of prepping, deploying and recovering geologic sensors trying to...

Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico. The impact carved out a 90-mile-wide crater and flung mountains of earth into space. Earthbound debris fell to the planet in droplets of molten rock and glass. Ancient fish caught glass blobs in their gills as they swam, gape-mouthed, beneath the strange rain. Large, sloshing waves threw animals onto dry land, then more waves buried them in silt. Scientists working in North Dakota recently dug up fossils of these fish: They died within the first minutes or hours after the asteroid hit, according to a paper...

It’s 102 degrees, just north of Palm Springs. White wind turbines, two stories high, dot the desert landscape all of the way to the base of snowcapped mountains in the distance. Seismologist and earthquake expert Lucy Jones is standing on a small hill looking south, towards California’s most consequential fault: the San Andreas. It runs nearly the length of the state, from the Salton Sea to near Mendocino. From where we’re standing, the only evidence of the fault are slight indentations in the earth, snaking through the landscape. There are rocks and soil that’ve been moved by years of tectonic...

During a press conference at a local hotel in Islamabad, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islami Fazl (JUI-F) Chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman asked the Pakistani armed forces to launch a military operation against women wearing jeans all over Pakistan. According to him, the immodesty of women is the cause behind earthquakes, inflation and other kinds of disasters. Fazlur Rehman went on to say that a woman who is not covered like a 'sack of flour' is a mobile weapon of mass destruction for her state and that Pakistan has multitude of such nuclear missiles in all its major cities. Rehman then blamed 'immodest women'...

With several faults slicing through the San Francisco Bay Area, forecasting the next deadly earthquake becomes a question of when and where, not if. Now researchers propose that four faults have built up enough seismic strain (stored energy) to unleash destructive earthquakes, according to a study published today (Oct. 13) in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. The quartet includes the Hayward Fault, the Rodgers Creek Fault, the Green Valley Fault and the Calaveras Fault. While all are smaller pieces of California's San Andreas Fault system, which is more than 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) long, the four faults...

Residents of Oklahoma were left feeling rattled over the weekend after a strong of some 20 earthquakes as powerful as 3.5 magnitude rocked the central part of the state on Saturday alone. Areas north of Oklahoma City felt the brunt of the temblors, which some say were accompanied by startling booms like the sound of an explosion. The mystery earthquake wave now has residents fearing for their personal safety and the security of their property. Meanwhile, scientists have been left scratching their heads over the quakes, which are becoming more frequent each day.

A magnitude 8.3 earthquake that struck deep beneath the Sea of Okhotsk on May 24, 2013, has left seismologists struggling to explain how it happened. At a depth of about 609 kilometers (378 miles), the intense pressure on the fault should inhibit the kind of rupture that took place. "It's a mystery how these earthquakes happen. How can rock slide against rock so fast while squeezed by the pressure from 610 kilometers of overlying rock?" said Thorne Lay, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Lay is coauthor of a paper, published in the...

Women who wear revealing dresses cause earthquakes: Cleric Tehran, May 4: Women who wear revealing clothing and behave immorally are responsible for earthquakes, this is what a senior Iranian cleric has to say. The cleric's unusual explanation for quakes follows the prediction made by the country's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that a quake is certain to rock Tehran and many of its 12 million inhabitants should relocate to save their lives. Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi told the country's media that women who do not dress in dignified manner "lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society". According to...

Pressure changes cause precious metal to deposit each time the crust moves. Scientists have long known that veins of gold are formed by mineral deposition from hot fluids flowing through cracks deep in Earth’s crust. But a study published today in Nature Geoscience1 has found that the process can occur almost instantaneously — possibly within a few tenths of a second. The process takes place along 'fault jogs' — sideways zigzag cracks that connect the main fault lines in rock, says first author Dion Weatherley, a seismologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. When an earthquake hits, the...

BUCHAREST, Romania — David defeated Goliath, again, last week in Romania’s capital city when an appeals court issued a final ruling in favor of a humble cathedral pitted against a gigantic steel office tower, concluding a seven-year legal and political struggle. In an unprecedented, definitive decision, the court ordered a 19-story skyscraper demolished and the land restored to its prior condition — a small, city park. Concurring with several lower court decisions, the judge concluded that the office tower, known as Cathedral Plaza, was illegally constructed without proper permits or authorizations in a brazen gesture that threatened the cathedral’s physical...

L'AQUILA, ITALY—Seven experts tasked with giving advice ahead of the deadly earthquake that struck here in 2009 have been found guilty of manslaughter by a judge in the central Italian town this evening. The four scientists, two engineers, and a government official were accused of having carried out a superficial analysis of seismic risk and of having provided false reassurances to the public ahead of the quake, which killed 309 people. The prosecution had requested prison terms of 4 years for the accused, but Judge Marco Billi has handed each a sentence of 6 years imprisonment. The lawyers of the...

An Italian court convicted seven scientists and experts of manslaughter on Monday for failing to adequately warn citizens before an earthquake struck L'Aquila in central Italy in 2009, killing more than 300 people. The court in L'Aquila sentenced the defendants to six years in prison. Each is a member of the country's Grand Commission on High Risks. … Scientists worldwide had decried the trial as ridiculous, contending that science has no reliable way to predict earthquakes.Among those convicted were some of Italy's most prominent and internationally respected seismologists and geological experts, including Enzo Boschi, former head of the country's Institute...

PASADENA (CBSLA.com) — The pair of quakes that hit near Yorba Linda last night and Wednesday morning were detected by a new earthquake warning system that was showcased at Cal Tech. A 4.5-magnitude temblor struck one mile northeast from Yorba Linda at 11:23 p.m. Tuesday. Less than 10 hours later, a 4.5-magnitude quake struck two miles from the same location. “In the case of the first event last night, here in Pasadena, we got about nine seconds warning before the strongest shaking was felt here,” said Douglas Given from the U.S. Geological Survey. “In the case of the second quake,...

NEWPORT, Ore. – New Tsunami warnings from Japan on Thursday again reminded West coast residents that it was just a month ago when the devastating earthquake triggered massive waves here; while Tsunami experts at nearby Oregon State University point to the “Cascadia Subduction Zone” as a clear and present threat in the wake of these new aftershocks that are rattling Japan again and causing new Tsunami warnings in the Pacific. According to recent reports by scientists at nearby Oregon State University in Corvallis, this Cascadia Subduction zone “has just experienced a cluster of four massive earthquakes during the past 1,600...

First before-after image (Google and GeoEye / March 12, 2011) Google on Saturday released its first satellite images of Japan since the devastation that followed a massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit the island nation Friday afternoon local time. The images, from Google partner GeoEye, were generated by the IKONOS satellite. Google Earth users may view images from Kamaishi, located to the north of Sendai, an area extremely hard hit by the quake and tsunami. In the images, taken Saturday morning, Kamaishi is somewhat obscured by cloud clover. In addition, Google released satellite images of Tokyo, also taken Saturday...

7.2 quake in Japan, analysis of current situation globally - March 9, 2011 Japan has legally mandated extensive preparedness for any kind of earthquakes. That this strong off-coast earthquake resulted in no casualty might be due to that. The country also has a unique seismic intensity scale called "Shindo" in addition to the magnitude scale. Magnitude is the released energy itself; intensity is the local effects of that energy. The recent M7+ earthquake most affected the northern part, where Shindo 5-lower was felt (the highest value being 7). The video shows swarms and successions of earthquakes on March 9 and...

When Mark Barrett moved to Guy, Arkansas, he had no idea the tiny town of less than 300 was nearly as rocking as the Southern California community he'd left behind. Six years and hundreds of seismic events later, Barrett says he's feeling it more and more. Since September, seismologists have recorded 700 temblors in the area. The largest in the current swarm, a 4.3-magnitude quake, shook the town at 2:13 a.m. Friday. The tremors appear to be rumbling through town with greater frequency. The Arkansas Geological Survey has recorded 50 quakes in and around Guy since Sunday. That includes Friday...

Israel conducted a massive controlled explosion to calibrate instruments at seismic monitoring stations worldwide, officials said. Using 100 tons of explosives, The Geophysical Institute of Israel conducted the explosion at a site in the Negev on Wednesday. It registered 2.7 on the Richter scale, and created a mushroom cloud that reached the height of up to 1.78 miles, or three kilometers, Haaretz reported Thursday. Local scientists and scientists from the U.S. and France as well as journalists observed the blast. Dr. Rami Hofstetter, head of seismology at the Geophysical Institute told the newspaper the experiment was important to study how...

As part of their battle to understand and protect against the destructive force of earthquakes, seismologists have gone to extraordinary lengths. They have bored holes deep into the earth's crust, laid out arrays of sensors hundreds of miles across, and built supercomputers capable of running simulations at teraflop speeds. But the most exciting new effort in cutting-edge seismology involves a piece of instrumentation that's a good deal less exotic. It's called an iPhone. "Each smartphone has an accelerometer built into it," says Robert W. Clayton, a professor of geology at Caltech. "It's primary function is to determine the orientation of...