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Provocative analysis of sea-floor cores suggests that quakes on the Cascadia fault off California can trigger tremors on the San Andreas. Two of North America’s most fearsome earthquake zones could be linked. A controversial study argues that at least eight times in the past 3,000 years, quakes made a one–two punch off the west coast of the United States. A quake hit the Cascadia fault off the coast of northern California, triggering a second quake on the San Andreas fault just to the south. In some cases, the delay between the quakes may have been decades long. The study suggests...

Wood Buried Under Ocean Floor Thousands of Miles at Sea October 22, 2019 | David F. Coppedge Wood chips hundreds of feet deep in ocean sediments have been found. How did they get there? Watch out for ocean trees. Geology researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) went boring into ocean sediments near India, and were surprised to find direct evidence that “Catastrophic events carry forests of trees thousands of miles to a burial at sea.” They pulled up six cores of sediment from the ocean floor a thousand feet below the surface. The cores were extracted miles apart...

The ruins are located close to the popular tourist destination and UNESCO World Heritage Site, Mamallapuram, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Just before the devastating 2004 Asian Tsunami hit, the ocean receded several hundred feet, and tourists reported glimpsing large stones and boulders in the distance. A 10-member team from the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) surveyed the area from March 10 to 18, and have found the ruins of one of six ancient temples that are thought to have been swallowed up by the ocean as sea levels rose. The team, comprising of divers, geologists and...

The defunct underwater wing of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) is set for a revival with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the government keen to establish the scientific veracity of Dwarka, the mythological submerged capital of Lord Krishna's kingdom, and the Rama Setu, a set of limestone shoals believed to date back to the Ramayana... "The National Institute of Oceanography has the expertise. They will be training our fleet of young divers," said Dr RS Fonia, ASI joint director general. The ministry of culture, the nodal ministry for ASI, is also looking at options to bring on board...

At the levels of radiation now being found a Fukushima, a robot would be able to operate for less than two hours before it was destroyed. And Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Sciences said medical professionals had never even thought about encountering this level of radiation in their work. The accident is enormous in its medical implications. Through future years, too long to contemplate, we will witness an epidemic of cancer as people inhale the radioactive elements, eat radioactive vegetables, rice and meat, and drink radioactive milk and teas. Year by year, decade through relentless decade, the radiation will build...

It’s not often you find a land development story (outside of Kelo) that’s worth a debate, but there’s one playing out this month that might have some broader implications worth considering. In the state of Oregon, work is underway to construct a new ocean-studies building, which sounds normal enough. But it’s being constructed right in the projected path of a tsunami which geologists are convinced is coming one of these days. It’s just a question of when.But the state legislature went ahead and repealed a previous ban on new construction of critical facilities, including schools and police departments. This has...

Experts say it’s only a matter of time before a shift in a major fault line off the Oregon coast causes a massive earthquake that generates a tsunami as much as seven stories tall. Even as work on Oregon State University’s Marine Studies Building was underway in Newport, the Legislature went a step further and repealed a ban on construction of new “critical facilities” in tsunami inundation zones, allowing fire stations, police stations and schools to be built in the potential path of a tsunami. Passage of the bill in June was little noticed during one of the most tumultuous...

Deep beneath the North Sea, scientists have discovered a fossilized forest that could hold traces of prehistoric early humans who lived there around 10,000 years ago, before the land slipped beneath the waves a few thousand years later. The discovery gives the researchers new hope in their search for "lost" Middle Stone Age — or Mesolithic — settlements of hunter-gatherers, because the find shows that they have found a particular type of exposed ancient landscape.

A strong 6.1 magnitude earthquake struck the northern Philippine island of Luzon on Monday. The earthquake was centered about 60 km (37 miles) northwest of the capital city of Manila, which is home to more than 12 million people. It's magnitude was initially rated as strong as 6.3. At least five fatalities have been confirmed so far in Pampanga province, according to Pampanga governor Lilia Pineda. More than 20 other people were injured due to collapsed buildings and walls in the province. Search and rescue operations are ongoing for at least 19 missing individuals, according to the Philippine Red Cross.

A 12-METRE monolith, hacked out of limestone by stone-age humans some nine thousand years ago, has been found at the bottom of the Mediterranean. The enormous stone totem, now split in two and sitting in the Sicilian Channel between Tunisia and Sicily, was hewed from a rocky outcrop some 300m away when the Mediterranean Sea was still a dry basin. It’s now under 40m of water. The new study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, says the area was submerged about 9350 years ago (give or take 200 years) when the last Ice Age retreated. Before that time the...

ROME (Reuters) - An underwater volcano with a base larger than Washington D.C. has been discovered just off the shores of Sicily, a scientist with Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology said on Thursday. The volcanic structure, which incorporates peaks previously thought to be separate volcanoes, was named Empedocles after the Greek philosopher who named the four classic elements of earth, air, fire and water. Legend has it that the philosopher died by throwing himself into Mount Etna, the nearby Sicilian volcano. Giovanni Lanzafame, who works at the institute and led the research, said Empedocles was at least 400...

Americans have long dreaded the “Big One,” a magnitude 8.0 earthquake along California’s San Andreas Fault that could one day kill thousands of people and cause billions of dollars in damage. The Big One, though, is a mere mini-me compared with the cataclysm forming beneath the Pacific Northwest. Roughly 100 miles off the West Coast, running from Mendocino, California, to Canada’s Vancouver Island, lurks the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where the Juan de Fuca Plate is sliding beneath the North American Plate, creating the conditions for a megathrust quake 30 times stronger than the worst-case scenario along the notorious San...

Archaeologists in Germany have uncovered the bodies of children and of one adult man who was buried, strangely, standing upright. One of the oldest cemeteries in Europe has recently been discovered, with graves dating back almost 8,500 years. Two of the most intriguing finds are the skeleton of a six-month-old child and a mysterious upright burial of a man in his early 20s. The German cemetery, called Gross Fredenwalde after a nearby village, belongs to a time known as the Mesolithic, when Europe was populated by hunter-gatherers. At a press conference Thursday morning in Berlin, excavators announced that nine skeletons...

The remains of hazelnuts eaten by some of Skye's earliest inhabitants were found at a dig on the island, archaeologists have revealed. Hazelnuts were a favourite snack of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, according to archaeologists at the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI). The shells found at an excavation above Staffin Bay could be 8,000-years-old. UHI carried out the dig along with Staffin Community Trust, school children and volunteers. Dan Lee, lifelong learning and outreach archaeologist at UHI, said: "We have found lots of fragments of charred hazelnut shells in the lower soil samples. "They are the ideal thing to date...

A genetic study of snails, combined with other factors, suggests a migration of Mesolithic peoples from the Pyrenees to Ireland. A recent study of the mitochondrial DNA of the Cepaea nemoralis land snail, a snail curiously common only between Ireland and the Pyrenees region of Southern France, has led researchers to conclude the possibility that ancient Mesolithic people carried the fauna with them in a migration from the French region to Ireland about 8,000 years ago. This correlates with studies of human genetics and the colonization of Ireland, according to the research* published June 19 in the open access journal...

Underwater archaeologists are taking to Loch Tay to try to uncover more about a submerged prehistoric woodland. The stumps of about 50 trees were discovered in 2005 - some of them are thought to be about 6,000 years old. The experts are now aiming to find their root system and establish the depth to which the trees are buried. Meanwhile, a campaign has been launched to help restore the reconstructed crannog, an ancient loch dwelling, which attracts thousands of visitors. The Scottish Trust for Underwater Archaeology will spend the next two weeks inspecting the drowned forest. They will be focusing...

Southeastern Norway is the most populous part of Norway today. Based on an analysis of more than 150 settlements along Oslo Fjord, the area apparently also appealed to Stone Age people. Eleven thousand years ago at the end of the last ice age, Norway was buried under a thick layer of ice. But it didn't take long for folks to wander their way north as the ice sheet melted away. The first traces of human habitation in Norway date from roughly 9500 BC. Steinar Solheim is an archaeologist at the University of Oslo's Museum of Cultural History who has worked...

Normal faults are generated throughout the crater from the impact force. Fault blocks form along the crater walls, breaking off and sliding back into the crater following impact. Rocks around the crater rim fill in much of the crater as it collapses. Furthermore, resurge waves deposit large amounts of rock fragments in and around the crater. It is common for the crater to almost completely refill and subsequently be buried[.]

Eight >50K foot high volcanic eruptions in the last week and a half. I have only been watching him for a few weeks but this seems newsworthy. No one else seems to be covering it. 7

Here we report preliminary evidence from Xisha Islands in the South China Sea for a large tsunami around AD 1024. Sand layers in lake sediment cores and their geochemical characteristics indicate a sudden deposition event around AD 1024, temporally consistent with a written record of a disastrous event characterized by high waves in AD 1076. Heavy coral and shell fossils, which are older than AD 1024, deposited more than 200 meters into the island, further support the occurrence of a high-energy event such as a tsunami or an unusually large storm. Our results underscore the importance of acknowledging and understanding the...