During the 20th century, earthquakes in Europe accounted for more than 200,000 deaths and over 250 billion Euros in losses. Comprehensive earthquake hazard and risk assessments are crucial to reducing the effects of catastrophic earthquakes because earthquakes cannot be prevented nor precisely predicted. An international team of European seismologists, geologists, and engineers, with leading support of members from the Swiss Seismological Service and the Group of Seismology and Geodynamics at ETH Zurich has; therefore, revised the earthquake hazard model that…
KyotoU drills into unexpected rupture pattern of active fault in southwestern Japan. The 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes shocked inhabitants of the western island of Kyushu, causing hundreds of casualties and serious damage to vital infrastructure. The epicenter of the quake was traced to the Futagawa fault in a region neighboring Mount Aso, an active volcano in Kumamoto Prefecture that last erupted in October 2021. An investigation of earth displaced by the series of quakes has offered potentially new clues into seismic activity in…
Team on the research vessel Neil Armstrong extracts core from the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench. A team of scientists, engineers, and ship’s crew on the research vessel Neil Armstrong operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) recently collected a 38-foot-long cylindrical sediment sample from the deepest part of the Puerto Rico Trench, nearly 5 miles below the surface. The sample core is breaking records as the deepest ever collected in the Atlantic Ocean, and possibly the deepest…
International study led by the University of Bonn records 1.5 million years of climate in the drill core. Changes in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) are considered to be the main cause of past and future climate change. A long-standing debate centers on whether the roughly 30 percent lower CO2 content of the ice-age atmosphere was caused by iron fertilization. It is argued that iron-rich dust is carried into the ocean by wind and water, where it stimulates…
On the micrometer scale deformation properties of metals change profoundly: the smooth and continuous behaviour of bulk materials often becomes jerky due to random strain bursts of various sizes. On the micrometer scale deformation properties of metals change profoundly: the smooth and continuous behaviour of bulk materials often becomes jerky due to random strain bursts of various sizes. The reason for this phenomenon is the complex intermittent redistribution of lattice dislocations (which are line-like ctystal defects responsible for the irreversible…
In a remote area, a mix of geophysical methods identifies magma transfer below the seafloor as the cause. Volcanoes can be found even off the coast of Antarctica. At the deep-sea volcano Orca, which has been inactive for a long time, a sequence of more than 85,000 earthquakes was registered in 2020, a swarm quake that reached proportions not previously observed for this region. The fact that such events can be studied and described in great detail even in such…
The research network “TrinkXtrem” wants to improve the forecast quality of groundwater models during extreme weather events. Ensuring the supply of drinking water during extreme weather events such as a long drought or heavy rainfall – this is the overarching goal of a new research project named TrinkXtrem. In this project, which starts with a kickoff meeting on April 12 and 13, 2022, water supply companies from various regions in Germany are cooperating with research institutions of the federal government…
… by ground-based very-low-frequency (VLF) transmitters. Narrow-band VLF transmitter waves originate from the powerful ground-based VLF transmitters for submarine communications, which are typically over the frequency range of 10–30 kHz. VLF transmitter signals, being guided by the gradients of the Earth’s magnetic field, can leak a portion of the wave power into the magnetosphere. Early theoretical studies suggested that VLF transmitter waves potentially play an important role in electron precipitations in the near-Earth space. With the availability of high-resolution wave…
Vast stores of helium from the Big Bang lingering in the core suggest Earth formed inside a solar nebula. Helium-3, a rare isotope of helium gas, is leaking out of Earth’s core, a new study reports. Because almost all helium-3 is from the Big Bang, the gas leak adds evidence that Earth formed inside a solar nebula, which has long been debated. Helium-3 has been measured at Earth’s surface in relatively small quantities. But scientists did not know how much…
HALO-(AC)3 field campaign investigates a worrying phenomenon. In mid-March 2022, the large-scale international HALO-(AC)3 research campaign will begin investigating transformations of air masses in the Arctic. Three German aircraft will be deployed, scientists from the UK and France will also be involved during joint flights with two further aircraft. The team of researchers will be focusing particularly on northwards-flowing warm air reaching into the central Arctic, which are often called warm air intrusions. The counterpart, cold air outbreaks with southwards-moving…
In the classic example of mountain-building, the Indian and Asian continental plates crashed – and continue colliding today – to form the world’s largest and highest geologic structures: the Himalayan Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau. Despite the importance of these formations, which influence the global climate through atmospheric circulation and seasonal monsoons, experts have proposed contradicting theories about how tectonic plates below the surface created the iconic behemoths. Now, using geochemical data from 225 hot springs, scientists have mapped the boundary…
Climate scientists reconsider the meaning and implications of drought in light of a changing world. Maps of the American West have featured ever darker shades of red over the past two decades. The colors illustrate the unprecedented drought blighting the region. In some areas, conditions have blown past severe and extreme drought into exceptional drought. But rather than add more superlatives to our descriptions, one group of scientists believes it’s time to reconsider the very definition of drought. Researchers from…
The tectonic plates that form the Earth’s surface are like puzzle pieces that are in constant, very slow motion – on average, they move only up to around 10 centimeters a year. But these puzzle pieces don’t quite fit together: there are zones on one plate that end up plunging under another – the so-called subduction zones, central to the dynamics of the planet. This movement is slow, but it can lead to moments of great energy release and, over…
High pressure softens the Earth’s crust in subduction zones and can detach it from the plate. Earth’s thin crust softens considerably when it dives down into the Earth attached to a tectonic plate. That is demonstrated by X-ray studies carried out using DESY’s X-ray source PETRA III on a mineral which occurs in large quantities in basaltic crust. This softening can even cause the crust to peel away from the underlying plate, as an international team led by Hauke Marquardt…
Levante the new, fourth high-performance computing system for Earth system research (HLRE-4) will start its operation on March 3, 2022, at the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) in the first expansion stage. The supercomputer, which like its predecessor “Mistral” is provided by the company Atos, will quadruple the computing power at DKRZ with 14 PetaFLOPS. This enables researchers to perform, for example, more or longer simulations with particularly high-resolution global climate and Earth system models on the DKRZ system. Such…
This has been confirmed by researchers from the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC) after producing sea salinity data obtained from measurements by the SMOS satellite, which were later incorporated into the TOPAZ Arctic prediction model. Researchers at the Barcelona Expert Center (BEC) of the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC) have proved that satellite-derived salinity improves marine circulation prediction in the Arctic, which, as in the rest of the planet, is directly influenced by this and other parameters such…
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