news 2020

Fishing boats pushed on to land in the city of Talcahunao, Chile by a tsunami, March 2010. Photo credit: Peter Burgess EU/ECHO New study validates accuracy in predicting the first wave, but weakness in forecasting 'trailing' waves Residents of coastal towns in Chile remember the catastrophic earthquakes that struck their country in 1960 and 2010, not always for the quakes themselves but for the tsunamis that followed.

A team of Australian researchers are about to set off on a landmark voyage to discover more about the Earth beneath our oceans, and what triggers underwater earthquakes. The team will sail on CSIRO research vessel  Investigator , to a remote area known as Macquarie Ridge, halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica, to place special monitoring equipment on the ocean floor.

Researchers have shown that over the past two thousand years, volcanoes have played a larger role in natural temperature variability than previously thought, and their climatic effects may have contributed to past societal and economic change. Some climate models assume that the effect of volcanoes is punctuated and short.

The largest-ever study of tree rings from Norilsk in the Russian Arctic has shown that the direct and indirect effects of industrial pollution in the region and beyond are far worse than previously thought.

A new fault simulator maps out how interactions between pressure, friction and fluids rising through a fault zone can lead to slow-motion quakes and seismic swarms. Earthquakes can be abrupt bursts of home-crumbling, ground-buckling energy when slices of the planet's crust long held in place by friction suddenly slip and lurch.

This image shows the usual, gentle effusive eruption typical of Mt Etna (Italy). The erupted Etna rock is melted in a wire furnace on the synchrotron beamline at Diamond Light Source. Richard Brooker Nanolite 'snow' surrounding an iron oxide microlite 'Christmas tree'. Even these small 50 nm spheres are actually made up of even smaller nanolites aggregated into clumps.

New imagery reveals the causes of seismic activity deep beneath the Himalaya region, contributing to an ongoing debate over the continental collision process when two tectonic plates crash into each other. In addition to being the last horizon for adventurers and spiritual seekers, the Himalaya region is a prime location for understanding geological processes.

Fibre-optic cables are emerging as a valuable tool for geoscientists and glaciologists. They offer a relatively inexpensive way of measuring even the tiniest glacial earthquakes - plus they can also be used to obtain more accurate images of the geological subsurface in earthquake-prone megacities. Today's fibre-optic cables move data at tremendous speeds, enabling us to stream films and TV shows in HD or even 8K resolution.

Despite climate change being most obvious to people as unseasonably warm winter days or melting glaciers, as much as 95 percent of the extra heat trapped on Earth by greenhouse gases is held in the world's oceans. For that reason, monitoring the temperature of ocean waters has been a priority for climate scientists, and now Caltech researchers have discovered that seismic rumblings on the seafloor can provide them with another tool for doing that.

Researchers have used a computer model to test a new hypothesis about the formation of the Alps while simulating seismic activity in Switzerland. This will help improve current earthquake risk models. For a long time, geoscientists have assumed that the Alps were formed when the Adriatic plate from the south collided with the Eurasian plate in the north.

Researchers at the University of Washington, Portland State University and the University of Oregon have shown that deep-seated landslides in the central Oregon Coast Range are triggered mostly by rainfall, not by large offshore earthquakes. The open-access paper was published Sept. 16 in Science Advances.

Phosphorus is essential for agriculture, yet this important plant nutrient is increasingly being lost from soils around the world. The primary cause is soil erosion, reports an international research team led by the University of Basel. The study Communications shows which continents and regions are most strongly affected.

Protected nature areas are essential for conserving the earth's biodiversity. But having isolated protected areas isn't enough; to really maintain biodiversity, it is essential that these areas are also connected. A new study by an international team of biologists, including James Allan of the University of Amsterdam, shows that this is a huge problem worldwide.

The impacts of predator loss and climate change are combining to devastate living reefs that have defined Alaskan kelp forests for centuries, according to new research published in Science. "We discovered that massive limestone reefs built by algae underpin the Aleutian Islands' kelp forest ecosystem," said Douglas Rasher, a senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and the lead author of the study.

Changes in the Earth's climate over the last 66 million years have been revealed in unprecedented detail by a team involving UCL researchers, highlighting four distinctive climatic states and the natural millionand thousand-year variability that Earth's climate has experienced. , the new global "climate reference curve" created by the team is the first record to continually and accurately trace how the Earth's climate has changed since the great extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Several minerals suffer radioactive self-irradiation and hence experience long-term changes of their properties. The mineral monazite virtually behaves "just alike Camembert cheese in which holes are drilled": Existing radiation damage heals itself. An international research team led by Lutz Nasdala, Institute of Mineralogy and Crystallography, University of Vienna, conducted an ion-irradiation study that has unravelled the causes of the self-healing of monazite.

Distinct psychological mix associated with mountain populations is consistent with the theory that harsh frontiers attracted certain personalities. This psychological fingerprint for mountainous areas may be an echo of the personality types that sought new lives in unknown territories Friedrich Götz When historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his famous thesis on the US frontier in 1893, he described the "coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness" it had forged in the American character.

A new study provides a comprehensive look at the motions and frictional laws driving destructive thrust-fault earthquakes Simulating an earthquake on a miniature scale in a laboratory known unofficially as the "seismological wind tunnel," engineers and seismologists have produced the most comprehensive look to date at the complex physics of friction driving destructive thrust-fault earthquakes.

Researchers have warned that mining threats to biodiversity caused by renewable energy production could surpass those averted by climate change mitigation. A University of Queensland study found protected areas, key biodiversity areas and the world's remaining wilderness would be under growing pressure from mining the minerals required for a clean energy transition.

Researchers at the University of Bern are the first in the world to succeed in determining the distance to a space debris object using a geodetic laser in daylight. The distance was determined on June 24, 2020 at the Swiss Optical Ground Station and Geodynamics Observatory Zimmerwald. The number of measurements can be multiplied thanks to the new possibility of observing space debris during the day.