Phone Call Saves Taiwan Mother-Daughter Pair from Collapsed Building by Stephanie Chiang
September 19, 2022
Introduction:
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — When the building in Yuli, Hualien collapsed on top of a mother-daughter pair during Sunday’s (Sept. 18) earthquake, the mother’s phone call to her husband helped rescuers locate them within the rubble.
Per an earlier report, a three-story building collapsed after a series of earthquakes, including one with a magnitude of 6.8 that struck on Sunday afternoon. Four people were buried as a result, and rescuers were able to find and save an elderly couple soon after the disaster.
A 39-year-old woman surnamed Yeh (葉) and her five-year-old daughter, however, remained trapped. Thankfully, they were conscious, and Yeh was able to call her husband on her cell phone for help.
CNA reported that, upon receiving the call, Yeh’s husband rushed to the scene, where first responders were trying to determine the number of people trapped in the building amidst the chaos. He waited and watched as rescuers worked to find his family and continued to speak to Yeh on the phone, comforting her despite his own anxiety.
In an EBC News report, Yeh’s husband could be heard saying that his wife and children were on the brink of being unable to talk. “They’re moving, they’re moving, okay? Just bear with it a little bit longer, relax, relax for now, okay?” he said on the phone.
Taupō Volcano Alert Level Raised: Earthquakes and Deformation Indicates Minor Volcanic Unrest September 19, 2022
Conclusion:
(New Zealand Herald) GNS had recorded almost 700 earthquakes mainly beneath Lake Taupō since May including a 4.2 magnitude shake on September 10.
This is the first time the alert level for the Taupō volcanic area has been raised to level one, despite there being 17 previous episodes of volcanic unrest in Taupō over the past 150 years, GNS said.
Several of these episodes were "more severe than what was currently being observed".
The Volcanic Alert Level [VAL] system is based on six levels, with the first level indicating minor volcanic unrest.
GNS Science Volcanologist Steven Sherburn said the system was introduced in late 1994 before the 1995-96 Ruapehu eruptions.
6.8 magnitude earthquake shakes Mexico, 1 dead
Source: ABC News/AP
MEXICO CITY -- A powerful earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.8 struck Mexico early Thursday, causing buildings to sway and leaving at least one person dead in the nation's capital. The earthquake struck shortly after 1 a.m., just three days after a 7.6-magnitude earthquake shook western and central Mexico, killing two.
The U.S. Geological Survey said Thursday’s earthquake, like Monday’s, was centered in the western state of Michoacan near the Pacific coast. The epicenter was about 29 miles (46 kilometers) south-southwest of Aguililla, Michoacan, at a depth of about 15 miles (24.1 kilometers).
Michoacan’s state government said the quake was felt throughout the state. It reported damage to a building in the city of Uruapan and some landslides on the highway that connects Michoacan and Guerrero with the coast.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said via Twitter that it was an aftershock from Monday’s quake and was also felt in the states of Colima, Jalisco and Guerrero.
A New Baby Island Has Just Been Born in The Pacific Ocean by Tom Hale
September, 2022
Introduction:
(IFL Science) A new island has sprung up in a patch of the southwest Pacific Ocean riddled with underwater volcanoes, according to NASA Earth Observatory.
It began with the eruption of an underwater volcano found in the Central Tonga Islands on September 10 – and within just eleven hours, a landmass emerged from the watery depths, created by oozing lava that had been cooled by the ocean waters and solidified.
Over the following days, lava continued to pour and the newly formed island grew. The island was 170 meters (558 feet) in diameter on September 16 and eventually swelled to 182 meters over the following two days.
By September 20, the island had grown to cover 24,000 square meters (6 acres) with an elevation of 10 meters (33 feet).
The formation of the new island was captured through imagery taken by the Landsat 9 satellite on September 14. In this natural-color image (see below), we see a vast plume of steam and ash drift away from the volcano. You can also see a cloud of discolored water growing around the landmass, created by the presence of superheated and acidic seawater containing volcanic rock and sulfur.
About five minutes after the 7.6 magnitude earthquake hit near Mexico's southwest coast Monday, typically calm water deep in a Death Valley National Park cave started sloshing against the surrounding limestone rock.
The reverberations from the earthquake more than 1,500 miles away created what experts have called a "desert tsunami," which on Monday made waves erupt up to 4 feet high in the cave known as Devils Hole, a pool of water about 10 feet wide, 70 feet long and more than 500 feet deep, in Amargosa Valley, Nevada.
The water in the partially filled cave has become an "unusual indicator of seismic activity" across the world, with earthquakes across the globe—as far as Japan, Indonesia and Chile—causing the water to splash up Devils Hole, according to the National Park Service website.
Interestingly, the 6.8 magnitude earthquake that also hit Mexico's southwest coast early Thursday—not far from Monday's epicenter—did not agitate the water or create any waves in Devils Hole, said Kevin Wilson, National Park Service aquatic ecologist. Thursday's earthquake struck outside Aguililla, a small town in the western state of Michoacán, just after 1 a.m., and caused at least two deaths. Two people also died in Monday's earthquake, the epicenter also in Michoacán, though farther east.
New Curtin University-led research has found that the world's next supercontinent, Amasia, will most likely form when the Pacific Ocean closes in 200 to 300 million years.
Published in National Science Review, the research team used a supercomputer to simulate how a supercontinent forms and found that because the Earth has been cooling for billions of years, the thickness and strength of the plates under the oceans reduce with time, making it difficult for the next supercontinent to assemble by closing the "young" oceans, such as the Atlantic or Indian oceans.
Lead author Dr. Chuan Huang, from Curtin's Earth Dynamics Research Group and the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the new findings were significant and provided insights into what would happen to Earth in the next 200 million years.
"Over the past 2 billion years, Earth's continents have collided together to form a supercontinent every 600 million years, known as the supercontinent cycle. This means that the current continents are due to come together again in a couple of hundred of million years' time," Dr. Huang said.
"The resulting new supercontinent has already been named Amasia because some believe that the Pacific Ocean will close (as opposed to the Atlantic and Indian oceans) when America collides with Asia. Australia is also expected to play a role in this important Earth event, first colliding with Asia and then connecting America and Asia once the Pacific Ocean closes.
Earthquake rattles Taiwan, but epicentre out at sea
Source: Reuters
TAIPEI, Oct 11 (Reuters) - A 5.9 magnitude earthquake with its epicentre in the sea off Taiwan's east coast rattled the island on Tuesday, the island's weather bureau said, with no immediate reports of damage.
The quake briefly shook buildings in the capital, Taipei. It had a depth of 17.9 km (11.1 miles), and could be felt across the northern, central and eastern parts of Taiwan, the weather bureau added.
Taiwan lies near the junction of two tectonic plates in the South China Sea and is prone to earthquakes.
More than 100 people were killed in a quake in southern Taiwan in 2016, while a 7.3 magnitude quake killed more than 2,000 people in 1999.
An artificial intelligence approach borrowed from natural language processing—much like language translation and autofill for text on your smart phone—can predict future fault friction and the next failure time with high resolution in laboratory earthquakes. The technique, applying AI to the fault's acoustic signals, advances previous work and goes beyond by predicting aspects of the future state of the fault's physical system.
"Simply put, we predict future friction. That's never been done, and it provides a potential path to near-term forecasting of earthquake timing in Earth," said Chris Johnson, co-lead author of a paper on the findings in Geophysical Research Letters.
Paul Johnson, corresponding author of the paper, geophysicist and Laboratory fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, leads a team that has made steady advances in applying various machine learning techniques to the challenge of forecasting earthquakes in the laboratory and in the field.
"The acoustic signals emitted by the laboratory fault contain foreshadowing information about the future fundamental physics of the system through the entire earthquake cycle and beyond, as we now show," Paul Johnson said. "That's never been seen before."
In a novel approach, the Los Alamos team applied a deep-learning transformer model to acoustic emissions broadcast from the laboratory fault to predict the frictional state.
"The deep-learning transformer model we used is synonymous with a language translation model, such as Google Translate, using a codebook to translate a sentence to a different language," said Chris Johnson. "You can think about this as writing an email in English and having the AI translate the English to Japanese while also anticipating your words and autofilling the end of the sentence."
California Quakes Mysteriously Preceded by Shifts in Earth's Magnetic Field by Mike McRae
October 10, 2022
Introduction:
(Science Alert) When the next big earthquake strikes somewhere around the world, it will arrive without warning, destroying infrastructure and putting lives at risk.
Yet for days leading up to the event, titanic geological forces will already be at work, warping the crust in subtle ways that could, in theory, predict the coming catastrophe.
One possible sign could involve flickers in the magnetic field that ebbs and flows around our planet. For decades, researchers have debated the merits of hunting for magnetic signatures to imminent tremors, for want of convincing evidence.
A new case-controlled study by QuakeFinder, a humanitarian research project within systems engineering services company Stellar Solutions, in collaboration with the Google Accelerated Science team, concludes there just might be a good reason to continue the search.
Applying machine learning to ground-based measurements of local magnetic changes in the lead-up to a number of significant earthquakes across California between 2005 and 2019, the researchers found signs of a pattern that demands further study.
How Gravity Inside the Earth Shaped Landscape Evolution October 11, 2022
Introduction:
(Futurity) New research examines the interplay between the evolution of the landscape, climate, and fossil record of mammal evolution and diversification in the Western United States.
A little explored aspect of this geosciences research is the connection between gravitational forces deep in the Earth and landscape evolution.
Now in a paper in Nature Communications, the researchers show by way of computer modeling that deep roots under mountain belts (analogous to the massive ice below the tip of an iceberg) trigger dramatic movements along faults that result in collapse of the mountain belt and exposure of rocks that were once some 15 miles below the surface.
The origin of these enigmatic exposures, called “metamorphic core complexes,” has been hotly debated within the scientific community.
Further extract:
The work builds on research also published in Nature Communications in 2022. Holt and colleagues published a first-of-a-kind model in three dimensions to illustrate the linkage between climate and tectonics to simulate the landscape and erosion/deposition history of the region before, during, and after the formation of these metamorphic core complexes.
...
The study required the vast computing resources provided by the High-Performance Computing Cluster SeaWulf at Stony Brook University. The climate modeling, produced by Ran Feng of the University of Connecticut, was supported by the Cheyenne supercomputer maintained at NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center.
Magnitude 5.1 earthquake rattles San Francisco Bay Area, the largest to strike the region in years
Source: USA Today
A magnitude 5.1 earthquake rattled the San Francisco Bay Area on Tuesday, shaking buildings and marking the strongest quake the region has seen in eight years.
There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake struck at 11:42 a.m. local time about 12 miles east of San Jose at a depth of about 4 miles. The area is about 40 miles southeast of downtown San Francisco.
The earthquake was the largest the Bay Area had experienced in years, according to USGS data and seismologist Lucy Jones. The last notable quake was a 6.0 magnitude earthquake that struck near Napa in 2014.
Tonga eruption's towering plume reached the 3rd layer of Earth's atmosphere
Source: CNN
CNN — When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted underwater in January, it created a plume of ash and water that broke through the third layer of Earth’s atmosphere. It was the highest-recorded volcanic plume and reached the mesosphere, where meteors and meteorites usually break apart and burn up in our atmosphere.
The mesosphere, about 31 to 50 miles (50 to 80 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, is above the troposphere and stratosphere and beneath two other layers. (The stratosphere and mesosphere are dry atmospheric layers.) The volcanic plume reached an altitude of 35.4 miles (57 kilometers) at its highest. It exceeded previous record holders such as the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines at 24.8 miles (40 kilometers) and the 1982 El Chichón eruption in Mexico, which reached 19.2 miles (31 kilometers).
Researchers used images captured by satellites passing over the eruption site to confirm the plume’s height. The eruption occurred January 15 in the southern Pacific Ocean off the Tongan archipelago, an area covered by three geostationary weather satellites. The GOES-17 satellite captured images of an umbrella cloud generated by the underwater eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano on Jan. 15, 2022. Crescent-shaped bow shock waves and numerous lighting strikes are also visible.
A study detailing the findings published Thursday in the journal Science. The towering plume sent into the upper layers of the atmosphere contained enough water to fill 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, according to previous detections from a NASA satellite. Understanding the height of the plume can help researchers study the impact the eruption might have on the global climate.
West Texas earthquake causes damage hundreds of miles away
Source: AP
53 minutes ago
MENTONE, Texas (AP) — A strong earthquake that struck a remote area of the West Texas desert caused damage in San Antonio, hundreds of miles from the epicenter, officials said.
University Health said Thursday that its Robert B. Green historical building was deemed unsafe because of damage sustained from the quake, which hit Wednesday in a remote area near the New Mexico border. The historical building is more than 100 years old and has been closed off for safety reasons, University Health said.
The quake initially had a 5.3 magnitude but that was revised upward to 5.4. The earthquake’s epicenter was about 23 miles (37 kilometers) south of Mentone, a tiny community about 350 miles (560 kilometers) northwest of San Antonio.
It was one of the strongest earthquakes on record in Texas and hit in an area known for oil and gas production. On Thursday, the state’s Railroad Commission — which regulates Texas’ oil and gas industry — sent inspectors to the site to determine whether any actions were needed.
Video: More Than 160 Killed After Earthquake Hits Indonesia
Mon, 21 November 2022 at 5:30 pm
At least 162 people are dead and hundreds more were injured after an earthquake struck Indonesia on Monday. Thousands of homes were damaged, a senior official said.
Time_Traveller wrote: ↑Mon Nov 21, 2022 7:57 pmVideo: More Than 160 Killed After Earthquake Hits Indonesia
Mon, 21 November 2022 at 5:30 pm
At least 162 people are dead and hundreds more were injured after an earthquake struck Indonesia on Monday. Thousands of homes were damaged, a senior official said.
Why are Shallow Earthquakes More Destructive? The Disaster in Java is a Devastating Example by Phil R. Cummins, Mudrik Rahmawan Daryono, and Stacey Servito Martin
November 22, 2022
Introduction:
(The Conversation) On November 21 2022 an earthquake near the Indonesian city of Cianjur in West Java caused at least 268 deaths and damaged 22,000 buildings.
At magnitude 5.6, this earthquake was much smaller than many other earthquakes that have caused death and destruction in Indonesia over the past few decades.
Why is this one so different? One of the main reasons the Cianjur earthquake was so destructive was its shallow depth of 10km.
This event should serve as a wake-up call to improve building practices in Indonesia, because we know from the past that much larger shallow events can occur in Java; it’s not a question of if but when.
Two of the most important factors that determine the intensity of ground shaking caused by an earthquake are its magnitude and distance.
Hawaii's Mauna Loa starts to erupt, sending ash nearby
Source: AP
HONOLULU (AP) — Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano, has started to erupt, prompting volcanic ash and debris to fall nearby, authorities said Monday.
The eruption began late Sunday night in the summit caldera of the volcano on the Big Island, the U.S. Geological Survey said. Early Monday, it said lava flows were contained within the summit area and weren’t threatening nearby communities.
The agency warned residents at risk from Mauna Loa lava flows should review their eruption preparations. Scientists had been on alert because of a recent spike in earthquakes at the summit of the volcano, which last erupted in 1984.
Mauna Loa, rising 13,679 feet (4,169 meters) above sea level, is the much larger neighbor to Kilauea volcano, which erupted in a residential neighborhood and destroyed 700 homes in 2018. Some of its slopes are much steeper than Kilauea’s so when it erupts, its lava can flow much faster.
6.4-magnitude earthquake hits northern California
Source: NBC News
A 6.4-magnitude earthquake rocked parts of Northern California early Tuesday, knocking out power for thousands. The quake hit at a depth of 10 miles just after 5:30 a.m. ET near Eureka in Humboldt County, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
It struck around 7.4 miles west-southwest of Ferndale, the agency said. More than a dozen smaller earthquakes appeared to hit parts of the region afterward, it said.
It was not immediately clear whether anyone was injured in the earthquake. More than 70,000 utility customers were without power in Humboldt County as of 8 a.m. ET Tuesday, according to the online outage tracker Poweroutage.us.
"Power is out across the county," Humboldt County's Office of Emergency Services said in a tweet, adding: "DO NOT CALL 911 UNLESS YOU ARE EXPERIENCING AN IMMEDIATE EMERGENCY."
