While much media attention has been paid to the development of an invisibility “cloak” that works with electromagnetic waves such as light, mathematicians from the University of Manchester have been looking at cloaking other wave-types, specifically, the damaging elastic waves generated by earthquakes. While their work, reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, is […]
University of Miami scientist Shimon Wdowinski (pictured) says that earthquakes – including the recent seismic events in Haiti and Taiwan – may be triggered by severe tropical storms (cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons). Wdowinski is presenting his, er, groundbreaking study at the 2011 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, in San Francisco. “Very wet rain events are […]
For hundreds of years people have been reporting unusual animal behavior prior to earthquakes. Now, scientists say that it may be caused by rock deformations in the Earth’s crust which release charged particles that then react with groundwater. The findings, by an international team of researchers led by Friedemann Freund from NASA, appear in the […]
New seismological research shows that the majority of modern earthquakes in the Midwest United States are merely aftershocks of a big quake that occurred two centuries ago. The study, conducted by researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Missouri-Columbia, appears in the latest issue of Nature. “This sounds strange at first,” said Northwestern’s Seth […]
In the same vein as the SETI@home project, the Quake Catcher Network (QCN) aims to operate a massive seismic event detection network using the sudden-motion sensors that are incorporated into laptop computers. These small accelerometer chips are designed to protect the delicate moving parts of your hard disk from sudden jolts, but it turns out […]
A new study in the journal Nature Geoscience shows that large earthquakes routinely trigger smaller jolts worldwide, sometimes as far away as on the opposite side of the planet and in areas not normally prone to quakes. “Previously it was thought seismically active regions or geothermal areas were most vulnerable to large earthquake triggers,” says […]
Natural soil bacteria could be used to stabilize buildings against earthquakes, turning loose sand around the building’s foundations into sandstone, say researchers at University of California – Davis. An article describing their work appears in the Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering. Soils behave very differently during an earthquake, with sandy soils adopting characteristics more […]
