Earth Sciences

Deep within Earth, researchers are finding hints of exotic materials and behaviors unrivaled anywhere else on the planet. Now a team of researchers is making connections between the dynamic activities deep inside Earth and geologic features at its surface.

The researchers, which include two seismologists from Arizona State University, have detected a relatively small and isolated patch of exotic material, called an ultra low velocity zone (ULVZ), that may in fact be a “root” for m

An international team of scientists, led by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of Oregon and University of Sydney, has discovered an active underwater volcano near the Samoan Island chain about 2,400 miles southwest of Hawaii.

During a research cruise to study the Samoan hot spot, scientists uncovered a submarine volcano growing in the summit crater of another larger underwater volcano, Vailulu’u. Research

The great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of December 26, 2004, was an event of stunning proportions, both in its human dimensions–nearly 300,000 lives lost–and as a geological phenomenon. The sudden rupture of a huge fault beneath the Indian Ocean unleashed a devastating tsunami. It was the largest earthquake in the past 40 years and was followed by the second largest just three months later (March 28, 2005) on an adjacent fault.

Modern monitoring technology gathered an unprece

Northern metropolitan Los Angeles is being squeezed at a rate of five millimeters [0.2 inches] a year, straining an area between two earthquake faults that serve as geologic bookends north and south of the affected region, according to NASA scientists.

The compression of the Los Angeles landscape is being monitored by a network of more than 250 precision global positioning system (GPS) receivers, known as the Southern California Integrated Global Positioning System Network

The earthquake that generated the Sumatran-Andaman Islands tsunami caused massive devastation, but exactly what happened beneath the ocean is the focus of modeling activities by an international team of geoscientists.

“The earthquake rupture ran a distance equivalent to the distance from Jacksonville, Florida to Boston, Mass.,” says Charles J. Ammon, associate professor of geosciences at Penn State. “This earthquake lasted just under 10 minutes, while most large earthquakes take o

Quake was twice as strong, but much slower than thought

The Sumatra-Andaman earthquake that generated a deadly tsunami on Dec. 26 was stronger and slower than most seismologists thought, according to scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in India and the United States Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.).

Using data from global positioning system (GPS) stations around the Pacific and Indian oceans, including previously unav