Advancing earthquake science worldwide
22 January 2025—The magnitude 7.9 Bonin Islands earthquake sequence, which ruptured deep within the earth near the base of the upper mantle, did not include an aftershock that extended to record depths into the lower mantle, according to a study in The Seismic Record. When Hao Zhang of the University … Continue Reading »
22 January 2025—Gather around, and let Susan Hough tell you the tale of the Summerville Light. Legend has it that the strange orb sometimes seen hovering over the railroad tracks in the remote area around Summerville, South Carolina is a lantern borne by a ghost whose husband lost his head … Continue Reading »
10 January 2025—Using an existing telecommunications fiber optic cable running along the sea floor, researchers identified faults and tracked the locations of whales traveling up and down the central California coast. Their study, published in Seismological Research Letters, demonstrates the potential of distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) for visualizing the geohazards … Continue Reading »
24 December 2024–The rapid, decade-long depletion of groundwater in Morocco’s Haouz plain may have affected the accumulation of tectonic stress that led to the deadly 8 September 2023 magnitude 6.8 Al Haouz earthquake, according to a new study published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. Bhaskar Kundu … Continue Reading »
11 December 2024–Military vehicles rumbling toward the presidential palace, bombs dropped by the Chilean Air Force, and an eerie quiet descending over Santiago after a curfew imposed by a military junta—a lone seismometer captured all these features of the 1973 Chilean coup d’état. In Seismological Research Letters, Sergio León-Rios of … Continue Reading »
13 November 2024–Wastewater injection resulting from oil and gas production in Oklahoma caused a dramatic rise in seismic activity in the state between 2009 and 2015. But regulatory efforts to backfill some injection wells with cement and reduce injection volumes have been effective in lowering the state’s induced earthquake rate, … Continue Reading »