A byproduct of oil and gas production is a large quantity of toxic wastewater called brine. Well-drillers dispose of brine by wastewater injected into deep rock formations, where its injection can cause earthquakes. Most quakes are relatively small, but some of them have been large and damaging. Yet predicting the amount of seismic activity from ...
There have been no major ground-rupturing earthquakes along California’s three highest slip rate faults in the past 100 years. A new study published in Seismological Research Letters concludes that this current “hiatus” has no precedent in the past 1,000 years. U.S. Geological Survey researchers Glenn Biasi and Kate Scharer analyzed long paleoseismic records from the San Andreas, San Jacinto, ...
Two moderate-sized earthquakes that struck the southern Sichuan Province of China last December and January were probably caused by nearby fracking operations, according to a new study published in Seismological Research Letters. The December 2018 magnitude 5.7 and the January 2019 magnitude 5.3 earthquakes in the South Sichuan Basin caused extensive damage to farmhouses and other structures in ...
Most schoolchildren learn that the Earth has three (or four) layers — a crust, mantle, and core, which is sometimes subdivided into an inner and outer core. That’s not wrong, but it does leave out several other layers that scientists have identified within the Earth, including the transition zone within the mantle. A massive earthquake ...
Videos have revealed the terrifying moment a major earthquake hit Alaska on November 30, 2018. The center of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake was just north of Anchorage, a city of some 300,000 people. The quake hit at 8:29 a.m. local time while it was still dark in the snow-covered state. Alaska has only six hours ...
A new analysis of thousands of very small earthquakes that have occurred in the San Bernardino basin near the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults suggests that the unusual deformation of some — they move in a different way than expected — may be due to “deep creep” 10 km below the Earth’s surface, say ...
A study of earthquakes induced by injecting fluids deep underground has revealed surprising patterns, suggesting that current recommendations for hydraulic fracturing, wastewater disposal, and geothermal wells may need to be revised. Researchers at UC Santa Cruz compiled and analyzed data from around the world for earthquakes clearly associated with injection wells. They found that a ...
New research shows that a big earthquake can not only cause others, but large ones, and on the opposite side of the Earth. Their findings were published in Nature Scientific Reports, and are an important step toward improved short-term earthquake forecasting and risk assessment. Scientists at Oregon State University looked at 44 years of seismic data and ...
Many researchers hypothesize that the southern tip of the 1,300-km-long San Andreas Fault Zone (SAFZ) could be the nucleation site of the next major earthquake on the fault, yet geoscientists cannot evaluate this hazard until the location and geometry of the fault zone are documented. In their new paper for Lithosphere, Susanne Jänecke and colleagues ...
About 700 million years ago, the Earth experienced unusual episodes of global cooling that geologists refer to as Snowball Earth. Several theories have been proposed to explain what triggered this dramatic cool down, which occurred during a geological era called the Neoproterozoic. In a new study published in the April issue of the journal Terra Nova, ...
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