Why Today's Indonesia Quake Didn't Make a Monster Tsunami
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The red star marks where the quake hit. CREDIT: USGS. The magnitude 8.6 earthquake that struck in the Indian Ocean off the western coast of Sumatra today resurrected fears of a repeat of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that proved one of the most devastating natural disasters in modern memory. However, this earthquake, which struck at 2:38 p.m. local time (4:38 a.m. ET), about 270 miles (435 kilometers) off the coast of the Indonesian island was a different animal altogether than the 2004 earthquake and tsunami, which killed more than 230,000 people and left millions homeless. "It...
Published on Saturday 19th of May 2012 06:09:17 AM
Transverse instability of megaripples
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Two kinds of sand ripples exist: normal, small ripples and megaripples with wavelengths reaching up to several meters. They differ also in their grain-size distributions (unimodal for sand ripples and bimodal for megaripples). While sand ripples form almost straight lines, megaripples have greater sinuosity due to their transverse instability, a property that causes small megaripple undulations to grow with time. The origin of the instability is due to variations in megaripple height, which do not diminish over time, as well as to the inverse dependence of ripple drift velocity on height. Thus, the taller regions of ripples will move more...
Published on Saturday 19th of May 2012 06:09:17 AM
Russia Volcano Bezymianny put on Code Red for imminent eruption
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One of the most active volcanoes in the world has been put on aviation color code red, the highest alert given by the Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team. KVERT assigned the code on Tuesday and warns of an imminent eruption. "Activity of the volcano continuously increases," says the alert. "Strong ash explosions up to 42,640 ft (13 km) a.s.l. possible at any time. Ongoing activity could affect international and low-flying aircraft.
Published on Saturday 19th of May 2012 06:09:17 AM
That's a Fact! The Little Grand Canyon
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That's a Fact - Little Grand Canyon Nearly 5 million people from all over the world visit the Grand Canyon in Arizona every year. Many believe that this 277-mile long gorge had formed over millions of years, but another famous North American landmark shows that the Grand Canyon could have been created much faster and not long ago.
Published on Saturday 19th of May 2012 06:09:17 AM
(Blessed) Nicolas Steno Google doodle marks his 374th birth anniversary
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Nicolas Steno, the Danish anatomist widely regarded as the father of geology, has been commemorated in a Google doodle marking his 374th birth anniversary on 11 January.The doodle illustrated the search engine's six letters in a geological style, with fossils in various bottom layers, with a green surface on top.Steno's work on the formation of rock layers and the fossils they contain was pivotal to the development of modern geology while his catholic piety has also been evaluated in recent decades with a view to his possible canonisation.Born as Niels Stensen, he left his native of Copenhagen in 1660 to...
Published on Saturday 19th of May 2012 06:09:17 AM
Stonehenge rocks Pembrokeshire link confirmed
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Experts say they have confirmed for the first time the precise origin of some of the rocks at Stonehenge.It has long been suspected that rhyolites from the northern Preseli Hills helped build the monument. But research by National Museum Wales and Leicester University has identified their source to within 70m (230ft) of Craig Rhos-y-felin, near Pont Saeson. The museum's Dr Richard Bevins said the find would help experts work out how the stones were moved to Wiltshire. For nine months Dr Bevins, keeper of geology at National Museum Wales, and Dr Rob Ixer of Leicester University collected and identified samples...
Published on Saturday 19th of May 2012 06:09:17 AM
New Technologies Redraw the World’s Energy Picture
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GOLDA MEIR, the former prime minister of Israel, used to tell a joke about how Moses must have made a wrong turn in the desert: “He dragged us 40 years through the desert to bring us to the one place in the Middle East where there was no oil.’ ” As it turns out, Moses may have had it right all along. In the last couple of years, vast amounts of natural gas have been found deep under Israel’s Mediterranean waters, and studies have begun to test the feasibility of extracting synthetic oil from a large kerogen-rich rock field southwest...
Published on Saturday 19th of May 2012 06:09:17 AM
Perfect fossil could be most complete dinosaur ever
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Dinosaur fossils don't come much more impressive than this. With 98 per cent of its skeleton preserved, this young predatory theropod from southern Germany may be the most complete dinosaur ever found. Oliver Rauhut, curator of the Bavarian State Collection for Palaeontology and Geology in Munich, announced the find yesterday. Although Chinese bird and dinosaur fossils are famed for delicate details such as their feathers, they don't match this 72-centimetre-long theropod in terms of clarity and completeness of preservation. The young dinosaur has been dated at 135 million years old, putting it in the early Cretaceous, but it has yet...
Published on Saturday 19th of May 2012 06:09:17 AM
The Strange Rubbing Boulders of the Atacama
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Boulder, CO, USA – A geologist's sharp eyes and upset stomach has led to the discovery, and almost too-close encounter, with an otherworldly geological process operating in a remote corner of northern Chile's Atacama Desert. The sour stomach belonged to University of Arizona geologist Jay Quade. It forced him and his colleagues Peter Reiners and Kendra Murray to stop their truck at a lifeless expanse of boulders which they had passed before without noticing anything unusual. "I had just crawled underneath the truck to get out of the sun," Quade said. The others had hiked off to look around, as...
Published on Saturday 19th of May 2012 06:09:17 AM
Half of Earth's Heat from Radioactive Decay
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Nearly half of the Earth's heat comes from the radioactive decay of materials inside, according to a large international research collaboration that includes a Kansas State University physicist. Studying the physical properties of Earth can help astrobiologists understand the mechanisms that caused our planet to become habitable. In turn, this information can then be used to determine where and how to search for habitable worlds throughout the Universe. ...
Published on Saturday 19th of May 2012 06:09:17 AM
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