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You are browsing the archive for Austin Elliott, Author at The Trembling Earth.

March 21, 2018

Twitter #EarthquakeCup is in full swing

In the grand tradition of #MammalMarchMadness, the exceedingly popular Twitter-poll-based geeky sciencey alternative to the US’s eponymous basketball tournament, which grew to extraordinary popularity after its inception by evolutionary biologist @Mammals_Suck […milk] (a.k.a. Katie Hinde), natural scientists have spawned a staggering array of spinoff competitions in their own fields. As it sweeps through the subdisciplines of geology, the phenomenon has arrived at earthquakes. Having a poll-based competition among history’s “greatest” …

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February 19, 2018

78 seconds of Earthquake Early Warning

Late on Friday afternoon, February 16, during the Chinese New Year street fair in la Ciudad de México, the tight hold between the North America and Cocos plates failed, the fault slipped, and the Pacific coast of Oaxaca lurched around a meter out toward the ocean. Within six seconds, the profound ripple this let loose through the crust heaved the Huazolotitlán seismic recording station westward as well, followed shortly by …

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September 20, 2017

Get Prepared Now

The scenes of violent shaking in dense urban Mexico City from the new Sept 19 earthquake are genuinely horrifying. Buildings twist, collide, crumble, buckle, and collapse before your eyes like some scene out of a movie; trees thrash wildly as boatmen on the Xochimilco Canals struggle for balance on a river being thrown violently from its banks; inside, furniture flies across rooms and ceilings cave in while desperate residents and officeworkers …

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August 17, 2017

A celestial celebration of Earth’s place in the Cosmos, mapped onto Earth

It’s been repeated now a million times, but its grandeur bears another announcement: on August 21, 2017, a long-awaited total solar eclipse will cast the moon’s narrow shadow directly across the United States. The reverse perspective–the vantage that humans have always had, although they haven’t necessarily understood it–is that the sun will be gradually but briefly blocked by the invisible day-time visage of the new moon. Although the eclipse will …

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April 25, 2017

Strong earthquake widely filmed in Chile

A swarm of magnitude ~5-6 earthquakes offshore Chile on April 23 was punctuated two days later by a much larger M6.9 earthquake yesterday evening. While nobody could have specifically predicted the size and timing of this earthquake, it is a terribly unsurprising event, occurring as it did in the midst of this swarm of heightened seismic activity, and in the highly seismically hazardous region of coastal Chile. As has been pointed out …

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April 11, 2017

Who feels earthquakes?

Earthquakes are felt by people somewhere on the globe just about hourly (see this USGS list of felt earthquakes in just the last 24 hours). Some places are particularly prone to them–think Japan, Indonesia, Chile, Italy, California–while some stable parts of the continents will go generations, or even millennia, without anyone there feeling any quaking of the ground. But even in, say, California, where “felt” earthquakes occur daily, most individuals go months …

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November 22, 2016

Here’s what earthquake early warning looks like

When a large earthquake struck the coast of Japan near Fukushima Tuesday morning, people all across the country were alerted nearly immediately–most in advance of significant shaking at their location–by the nation’s sophisticated early warning system. Early warning doesn’t predict the onset of an earthquake, but it does predict the shaking level and time of arrival at locations all around the epicenter once one has begun but before its seismic …

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November 18, 2016

Complex, compound New Zealand earthquake – Part 2: Faulting by Day

Reeling from the massive M7.8 earthquake at midnight, its relentless aftershocks, and the continuing coastal threat of tsunami, New Zealanders awaited daylight on Monday to see the full extent of the destruction. The bizarre seismic records observed overnight had raised confusion and speculation about what faults were to blame for this earthquake. With an epicenter on land but also a several meter tsunami, it was clear that some complicated combination of on- …

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November 16, 2016

Complex, compound New Zealand earthquake – Part 1: Seismology by Night

Just after midnight last Sunday, the whole country of New Zealand was rocked by a massive earthquake at the north end of the South Island. From the outset, this earthquake was more confounding than most, and as more reports and data amass, we’re gaining a picture of a complicated earthquake that stemmed from the failure of several large faults in succession. These successive failures may have resulted from structural linkages …

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August 18, 2016

Studying Earthquakes from England

I’m back at it! This blog has suffered a long hiatus for which I could prattle on with a multitude of excuses, but suffice it to say that the shift from U.S. PhD student life to European postdoc life resulted in a pretty vast rearrangement of my day-to-day activities, priorities, schedule, and habits, and I’ve struggled to carve the time for all the things I’m still even more excited to …

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