This week’s geology news was very heavy on events in Chile & Oklahoma:
- continuing (and probably ending) the Chilean mine story, this week reports were about the rescue of the miners
- however, though the Chilean story turned out well, this week also saw reports of the death of 2 of 4 Ecuador miners trapped in a gold mine and a coal mine collapse in China that has resulted in 21 deaths & 16 trapped miners
- more coverage of the toxic spill in Hungary
- a new study this week talked about how carbon dioxide controls the Earth’s temperature (wait, didn’t we know that?)
- there was also a story about “the big one” predicted for the San Andreas, which I missed via my normal twitter & geoblog monitoring…
- and out of left field, I had one submission about tsunamis on Saturn and one about a sinkhole in Hobhoken
- my student who tries very hard to match up the week’s lectures (end of volcanoes & beginning of sed rocks) to her entry found an article about erosion endangering the Pago Reef
- Ron Schott (@rschott) commented on the faulting in the upper peninsula of Michigan, which one of my students also uncovered
- interesting link to the twitter (@stressrelated) & geoblog (NYTimes blog) discussions of a Nature Geoscience paper: several students chose to write about the tsunami risk to LA & Haiti due to strike-slip faulting
- the flooding line of entries continued this week in southern Russia
- volcanoes: Piton de la Fournaise eruption on Reunion (covered by Erik at Eruptions & @volcanotweet); images of Klyuchevskaya as highlighted by NASA’s Earth Observatory site (also mentioned by Erik at Eruptions)
- EQs: the 4.3 earthquake in mid-Oklahoma on 13. October was fairly popular (the other one mentioned by a student was a 6.1 in Timor on 16. Oct)
(Thanks to last week’s commentator’s, I now know how to link directly to specific tweets.)
Elli Goeke
I found the San Andreas article: http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/38/6/555.abstract . I haven’t read it. I suspect it should be considered in conjunction with another paper about how paleoseismic studies in the Carrizo Plain have underestimated the number of earthquakes on the segment north of LA. (I don’t remember where the Carrizo paper was published, but I know Ramon Arrowsmith was one of the authors.)
I should probably bookmark these for a structure paper discussion next semester… thanks for the heads-up
The papers:
Zielke et al., 2010, Slip in the 1857 and earlier large earthquakes along the Carrizo Plain, San Andreas Fault: Science, v. 327, p. 1119: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/327/5969/1119
Ludwig et al., 2010, Climate-modulated channel incision and rupture history of the San Andreas Fault in the Carrizo Plain: Science, v. 327, p. 117: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/327/5969/1117
Akciz et al., 2010, Century-long average time intervals between earthquake ruptures of the San Andreas fault in the Carrizo Plain, California: Geology, v. 38, p. 787-790: http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/38/9/787.full
(Science behind paywall, but Geology paper is supposed to be accessible…)
also discussion on Arrowsmith’s blog: https://arrowsmith.blog.asu.edu/2010/08/20/century-long-average-time-intervals-between-earthquake-ruptures-of-the-san-andreas-fault-in-the-carrizo-plain-california/?triedWebauth=1