Advancing earthquake science worldwide
22 April 2022–Earthquake aftershocks form spatial clusters around a mainshock, instead of evenly surrounding the mainshock. Researchers have known this for decades, but the reasons for this clustering are still unclear. To explore this question further, Jeanne Hardebeck of the U.S. Geological Survey took a closer look at the aftershock … Continue Reading »
22 April 2022–The 12 August 2021 South Sandwich Island earthquake had a surprise hidden within its complex rupture sequence: a slow, shallow magnitude 8.16 subevent that was “invisible” to researchers at first glance. At the Seismological Society of America’s Annual Meeting, Zhe Jia, a geophysics graduate student at CalTech, described … Continue Reading »
21 April 2022–Earthbound seismologists have the luxury of deploying their seismometers on relatively peaceful ground, but scientists studying Venusquakes have had to set their sights higher. Since high temperatures and pressures on Venus’ surface make it technologically challenging to place seismometers there, researchers are working on balloon-borne instruments that detect … Continue Reading »
21 April 2022–Public tests of an earthquake early warning system in Nicaragua are among the latest steps in a collaboration to build a warning system for four countries in the region, Frederick Massin of the Swiss Seismological Service at ETH Zürich said at the Seismological Society of America’s Annual Meeting. … Continue Reading »
21 April 2022–A device that could detect minute, transient fluctuations in gravity caused by an earthquake could be a useful tool in earthquake early warning systems, researchers said at the Seismological Society of America’s Annual Meeting. The Superconducting Earthquake Early-warning Device (SEED), proposed by Ho Jung Paik of the University … Continue Reading »
21 April 2022–Unused telecommunications fiber could form the backbone of earthquake early warning systems that complement existing warning systems and fill in critical gaps such as offshore detection, Robert Mellors said at the Seismological Society of America’s Annual Meeting. Distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, uses the tiny internal flaws in … Continue Reading »