Advancing earthquake science worldwide
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 »
25 September 2024–The five largest continental transform earthquakes since 2000 all originated on a branch of the main fault—and two researchers predict that the next great earthquake of this type will also get its start on a branch or splay fault. Last year’s magnitude 7.8 Pazarcık earthquake in Türkiye was … Continue Reading »
29 August 2024–About 21 million years ago the Yap Trench collided with a thick piece of ocean crust called the Caroline Plateau. But is the Yap Trench still an active subduction zone? And why does the Yap Trench look a little different from its subduction zone neighbors in the western … Continue Reading »
7 August 2024–Using data collected from a 2022 magnitude 6.8 earthquake in Luding County in China’s Sichuan Province, researchers tested whether Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) observations could be used for rapid prediction of earthquake-triggered landslides. In their report in Seismological Research Letters, Kejie Chen of the Southern University of … Continue Reading »
13 March 2024–Seattle may have experienced its own Swift Quake last July, but at an August 2023 concert Taylor Swift’s fans in Los Angeles gave scientists a lot of shaking to ponder. After some debate, a research team led by Gabrielle Tepp of Caltech concluded that it was likely the … Continue Reading »
28 February 2024–An increasing number of seismologists are using fiber optic cables to detect seismic waves on Earth—but how would this technology fare on the Moon, and what would it tell us about the deep layers of our nearest neighbor in space? In Seismological Research Letters, Wenbo Wu of Woods … Continue Reading »