20 April 2023–South Korea is a relatively quiet country, seismically speaking, but a recent study identified more than 182,000 small seismic events–135,000 of which were related to mining explosions, according to a presentation at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)’s 2023 Annual Meeting. After using machine learning techniques to detect … Continue Reading »

20 April 2023–Faults in the Ridgecrest, California area were very sensitive to solid earth tidal stresses in the year and a half before the July 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence, researchers reported at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)’s 2023 Annual Meeting. “The signal of tidal modulation becomes extremely strong” after … Continue Reading »

20 April 2023–A decade’s worth of research at oil and gas operations in the central and eastern United States has confirmed that fluid injection from hydraulic fracturing and wastewater disposal can induce seismicity. Now, data from hydraulic fracturing wells in eastern Ohio indicate that extraction activities also can influence the … Continue Reading »

19 April 2023–Earthquakes, lava bubbling through the sea floor and fin whale calls are all part of the noisy seismic environment at Axial Seamount, an active submarine volcano located about 480 kilometers west of Oregon’s Cannon Beach. To identify the sources of all these seismic noises, Kaiwen Wang of Lamont-Doherty … Continue Reading »

19 April 2023–On 24 September, about a cup’s worth of the rocky surface of asteroid Bennu will be returned to Earth in a sample return capsule, ending the 12-year mission of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it lands in the Utah desert. Researchers led by Sandia National Laboratories will be “listening” … Continue Reading »

18 April 2023–Analyzing hydraulic fracturing (HF) wells in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and West Canada, researchers found that the average daily injection rates and the total injected volumes are not a crucial factor in determining whether a stimulation will trigger nearby earthquakes. As Iason Grigoratos of ETH Zürich and colleagues … Continue Reading »