Earth Sciences

Northwestern University seismologists have determined that the Dec. 26 Sumatra earthquake that set off a deadly tsunami throughout the Indian Ocean was three times larger than originally thought, making it the second largest earthquake ever instrumentally recorded and explaining why the tsunami was so destructive.

By analyzing seismograms from the earthquake, Seth Stein and Emile Okal, both professors of geological sciences in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Science

See the face of Europe from space – with the entire continent covered in consistent detail. This set of true-colour Envisat satellite mosaics depicts the ten newest members of the European Union as well as ESA’s 15 current member states and two pending accessions of Greece and Luxembourg.

The crowning mosaic in the series represents approximately 1.6 million square kilometres of European territory at 300-metre resolution. All the mosaics were produced using the Medium Reso

Injecting synthetic “super” greenhouse gases into the Martian atmosphere could raise the planet’s temperature enough to melt its polar ice caps and create conditions suitable for sustaining biological life. In fact, a team of researchers suggests that introducing global warming on the Red Planet may be the best approach for warming the planet’s frozen landscape and turning it into a habitable world in the future.

Margarita Marinova, then at the NASA Ames Research Center, a

The British Geological Survey (BGS) announced today that they will start sending scientists to the affected regions next Monday. The scientists will help with the rebuilding process and address immediate problems such as contaminated freshwater supplies.

Following a symposium in Thailand (31 January –1 February), David Ovadia, head of the BGS international team, said, ‘What we got out of the conference was a consolidated, agreed list of scientific activities that the affected countr

Physicists in the US have proven that wax is a perfect model of the ocean floors. Using a tub of wax, geophysicists at Cornell and Columbia have produced a predictive model of tectonic microplates – one of the most important and poorly understood features of plate tectonics – for the first time. This research is reported today in the New Journal of Physics (www.njp.org) published jointly by the Institute of Physics and the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft).

The February issue of GEOLOGY covers a wide variety of potentially newsworthy subjects. Topics include: earthquakes in the central Indian Ocean and possible break-up of the Indo-Australian tectonic plate; dynamics of the Chicxulub impact tsunami; sea-level rise and the future of reef islands; evidence for abrupt climate change triggered by meltwater from glacial Lake Iroquois; new evidence from the Late Ordovician of CO2 as driver of climate change; and new support for a causal relationship bet