Breaking News: Earthquakes

• share
• favorite_border

A dormant volcano in Antarctica helped researchers at Sandia National Laboratories improve sensor data readings to better detect earthquakes and explosions and tune out everyday sounds such as traffic and footsteps. Finding the ideal settings for each sensor in a network to detect vibrations in the ground, or seismic activity, can be a painstaking and manual process. Researchers at Sandia are working to change that by using software that automatically adjusts the seismic activity detection levels for each sensor. Sandia tested the new software with seismic data from the Mt. Erebus volcano in Antarctica and achieved 18 percent fewer false detections and 11 percent fewer missed detections than the original performance of the sensors on Mt. Erebus.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

The world’s largest outdoor earthquake simulator, operated by structural engineers at the University of California San Diego, has received a $16.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to upgrade the facility to expand its testing capabilities. The funds will enable the simulator, also commonly known as a shake table, to more realistically recreate the motion of the ground during strong earthquakes.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

SLU scientists report that reservoir water played a role in causing earthquakes in the Three Gorges Reservoir Region of China.

• share
• favorite_border

On the night of Jan. 16, 2018, a meteor burst in the skies over Michigan, producing a fireball that was seen by people across seven U.S. states and in Ontario province.

• share
• favorite_border

Iowa State's Igor Beresnev has worked summers and weekends to find the answer to a very old question in seismology. Yes, he says, there is a limit to ground accelerations during an earthquake.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

A team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national labs, is leveraging powerful supercomputers to portray the impact of high-frequency ground motion on thousands of representative different-sized buildings spread out across the California region.

• share
• favorite_border

University at Buffalo researchers are using stigmergy, a biological phenomenon that has been used to explain everything from the behavior of termites and beavers to the popularity of Wikipedia, to build new problem-solving autonomous robots.

• share
• favorite_border

For the second year in a row, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute earthquake engineering experts Ricardo Dobry and Tarek Abdoun have been selected by the Geo-Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) to receive the Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award.

• share
• favorite_border

In a new study published in the April issue of the journal Terra Nova, geologists at The University of Texas at Dallas and UT Austin suggest that episodes of global cooling that geologists refer to as “Snowball Earth” can be linked to the advent of plate tectonics.

• share
• favorite_border

Powerful hurricanes and earthquakes have wreaked havoc in the United States and around the world in recent years, often leaving people stranded for months and even years without access to water, food, and shelter. A unique collaborative project at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute seeks to provide a sustainable solution, while also considering the environment.

• share
• favorite_border

Northern California's next big earthquake could kill 800 people and cause more than $100 billion in economic losses. One in four buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area could be unsafe to re-enter after a major earthquake or would be otherwise limited in their usability.

• share
• favorite_border

The largest and most-devastating earthquakes and volcano eruptions occur where one tectonic plate is shifted underneath another one. A New Mexico State University researcher authored a paper published recently in “Nature Communications” that looks at the so-called subduction zones where the plates become “slabs” and sink into the Earth's mantle.

• share
• favorite_border

By applying a new spectroscopy technique to garnet containing fragments of quartz, metamorphic petrologist Frank Spear of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute thinks he’s found the source of water that fuels earthquakes in volcanoes in subduction zones.

• share
• favorite_border

In the next 30 years, there is a one-in-three chance that the Hayward fault will rupture with a 6.7 magnitude or higher earthquake, according to the United States Geologic Survey (USGS). Such an earthquake will cause widespread damage to structures, transportation and utilities, as well as economic and social disruption in the East Bay.

• share
• favorite_border

A huge increase in the number of man-made earthquakes in Oklahoma, USA, is strongly linked to the depth at which wastewater from the oil and gas industry is injected into the ground, according to a new study involving the University of Southampton.

• share
• favorite_border