You are browsing the archive for japan Archives - Mountain Beltway.
6 April 2012
Friday fold: Japanese garden
Richard Littauer, a MSc student in Computational Linguistics at the University of Saarland (on Twitter at @richlitt) sent me today’s Friday fold. It comes from a garden at Nijo Castle in Kyoto, Japan. Definitely some wavy layers there. It’s a lovely specimen that would add gravitas to anyone’s garden. Not sure what it is – are these sedimentary strata or volcanic units? There’s plenty of sedimentary rock in Japan in …
15 March 2011
New GPS vectors
Just wanted to call your attention to two new maps showing GPS displacement vectors from Japan. (Barry left links to these images in a comment yesterday.) These images are hosted on the website of the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, and though I can’t read the Japanese to verify their authorship, I presume that agency produced them as well. They are easier to read than the one I posted on …
12 March 2011
Secondary effects
Earthquakes themselves are rarely directly responsible for deaths… If you’re out in a field, or a park, it’s a disorienting experience, and you may see some weird stuff, but you’re not likely to be killed via whiplash. Usually, casualties are induced due to the collapse of buildings, or roads, bridges, tunnels, or other infrastructure failing due to being shaken by the seismic waves. Someone paraphrased the NRA yesterday with the …
The morning after
A new resource for the Japanese earthquake is online this morning, a “supersite” similar to the ones that exist for other huge events. Checking it out this morning, I found some interesting stuff. Over night, there have been more aftershocks, and here’s the most recent 600 or so events in the area, taken from IRIS’s interactive map. You can see the big circle that represents yesterday’s main shock: Explore the …
11 March 2011
Art imitates art
Something occurred to me this morning when I saw this: (source) …And it was this: (source) Do you think it’s a coincidence that NOAA’s mapmaker chose that particular royal blue / sky blue / white color scheme, augmented by gray continents with yellow accents? I suspect it’s a beautiful shout-out to the classic piece of tsunami art. The reality is that tsunami are often a horrid brown gray color, full …
Japan M8.9 quake + tsunami
I’m not usually the “report on current events” type of geoblogger, but someone needs to throw a few details up ASAP for those who are interested in the details of the big Japanese earthquake and resulting tsunami that is currently crossing the Pacific Ocean. First off: links to other geoblogs already reporting on the event: Geotripper, Paleoseismicity, Hypo-theses, Dan’s Wild, Wild Science Journal , Eruptions, Georneys, Hudson Valley Geologist, and …
5 March 2010
Is this dike a feeder?
A new paper in the journal Geology examines an interesting question: how can you tell feeder dikes from non-feeder dikes? The answer is, normally you can’t. Normally, there’s no way to tell for sure whether a given dike actually funneled magma to the paleo-surface, or whether it never reached the paleo-surface. The reason for this is that usually, the paleo-surface is gone by the time the dike is exposed at …
Callan Bentley is Associate Professor of Geology at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. For his work on this blog, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers recognized him with the James Shea Award. He has also won the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia, and the Biggs Award for Excellence in Geoscience Teaching from the Geoscience Education Division of the Geological Society of America. In previous years, Callan served as a contributing editor at EARTH magazine, President of the Geological Society of Washington and President the Geo2YC division of NAGT.