Advancing earthquake science worldwide
26 April 2019–About 16.7 million years ago, the Columbia River flood basalt event covered much of eastern Oregon, parts of western Idaho and southern Washington state. The massive outpouring of basalt lava, covering about 63,000 square miles of the Pacific Northwest, is thought to have originated from the Yellowstone volcanic … Continue Reading »
26 April 2019–In the past decade scientists have been experimenting with metamaterials, artificial materials designed with periodic internal structures to give them properties not found in natural materials. Depending on their internal geometry and composition, researchers have found that they can control waves propagating through some of these materials, filtering … Continue Reading »
25 April 2019–Small earthquakes in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Texas can be linked to hydraulic fracturing wells in those regions, according to researchers speaking at the SSA 2019 Annual Meeting. While relatively rare compared to earthquakes caused by wastewater disposal in oil and gas fields in the central … Continue Reading »
25 April 2019–Ever since Hawaii’s Kilauea stopped erupting in August 2018, ceasing activity for the first time in 35 years, scientists have been wondering about the volcano’s future. Its similarities to the Hawaiian seamount Lo`ihi might provide some answers, according to Jacqueline Caplan-Auerbach at Western Washington University. In her presentation … Continue Reading »
25 April 2019–There have been no major ground rupturing earthquakes along California’s three highest slip rate faults—the San Andreas, the San Jacinto and the Hayward—in the past 100 years. At the 2019 SSA Annual Meeting, researchers discussed why this “hiatus” might exist, and what we might expect for California earthquakes … Continue Reading »
25 April 2019–A spring surge of meltwater, seeping through vertically tilted layers of rock, caused a seismic swarm near California’s Long Valley Caldera in 2017, according to research presented at the 2019 SSA Annual Meeting. The unusual event prompted U.S. Geological Survey researcher Emily Montgomery-Brown and her colleagues to look … Continue Reading »