Advancing earthquake science worldwide
17 April 2026—A seismic hush fell over U.S. and Canadian cities that were in the “path of totality” during the 8 April 2024 total solar eclipse, according to new research presented at the 2026 SSA Annual Meeting. Johns Hopkins University seismologist and planetary scientist Benjamin Fernando was in an Ohio … Continue Reading »
17 April 2026—Thawing permafrost buried underneath rivers may be accelerating permafrost degradation faster than previously estimated in these inundated regions, according to new research shared at the 2026 SSA Annual Meeting. Haoyuan Sun of Zhejiang University and colleagues used distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) on an existing telecommunications cable to develop … Continue Reading »
16 April 2026—In subduction zones, the sites of the world’s largest earthquakes, tectonic activity may generate a “pump” that transports long-buried subseafloor microbes back toward the seafloor, according to research presented at the 2026 SSA Annual Meeting. These microbes are the world’s most dedicated sleeping beauties, lying dormant for thousands … Continue Reading »
16 April 2026—Placed within a borehole drilled deep through the layers of a landslide, a fiber optic cable captured tiny, periodic stick-slip events that offer a unique glimpse at the complex movements within the landslide’s shear zone. At the Lantai site in northern Taiwan, researchers concluded that the timing and … Continue Reading »
16 April 2026—The first qualitative study in the United States examining the experience of deaf, deafblind and hard of hearing individuals (DHH+) with earthquake early warning (EEW) highlights accessibility gaps in disaster alert systems. At the 2026 SSA Annual Meeting, a team of researchers led by Michele Cooke at the … Continue Reading »
16 April 2026—Researchers used the large language model Gemini 2.5 Pro™ to extract data from personal reports of a 1957 earthquake to create a shaking intensity map for the magnitude 5.3 event that rocked the San Francisco Bay Area. The process that turned Gemini into a “digital archivist, described at … Continue Reading »