Earthquakes Archives - State of the Planet

California Quake Faults Are Highly Sensitive to Solid Earth Tides, Say Scientists

Oceans have tides, and so does the solid earth. Could they have an effect on earthquake faults? Yes, say scientists, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they cause big quakes.

by |May 10, 2023
map of earthquake impacts

Gauging Losses and Lessons in Turkey’s Unfolding Earthquake Tragedy

As earthquake engineers stress, most of the time, buildings kill people, not the shaking itself. It’s exceedingly hard to unbuild, move back, or retrofit buildings at scale.

by |February 7, 2023

Balancing Act: Can Precariously Perched Boulders Signal New York’s Earthquake Risk?

Long ago, melting glaciers dropped giant boulders onto surfaces in the New York City exurbs, and many seem to remain in their original, delicately balanced positions. Can they be used to judge the maximum sizes of past earthquakes?

by |July 21, 2022

Looking for the Origin of Slow Earthquakes in the Guerrero Gap

We are underway on our 48-day long expedition offshore of the west coast of Mexico near Acapulco, where the young Cocos oceanic plate dives beneath the North American plate.

by Anne Bécel |June 7, 2022

Sylhet City, Geology, and Packing Up

We finished our electromagnetic survey and mini-field school in northern Sylhet, Bangladesh, with lectures and field trips to see the geology by car and boat.

by |May 27, 2022

Start of the Mini-Field School

We were joined in our electromagnetic investigation of the subsurface and earthquake hazard by a group of US and Bangladeshi students and professors for a mini-Field School.

by |May 20, 2022

Tea Gardens to the Rescue

We switched to deploying our equipment for imaging faults and the structure beneath the surface to tea gardens to get away from power lines and buried the cables to protect them from gnawing foxes.

by |May 12, 2022

Dealing With Rain and Rats

As we continued our geophysical measurements, we had to deal with heavy rains, flooding fields, and rats and foxes biting our cables. Many cables were broken soon after sunset, ruining the measurements.

by |May 9, 2022

Fieldwork in Bangladesh During the End of Ramadan and Eid Festival

We have come to in Bangladesh in the pre-monsoon heat to better image the active faults beneath the surface using electromagnetic instruments. We are using the fallow fields from the just-harvested rice crop for our sites.

by |May 3, 2022
The Matterhorn, a 4,478 meter peak that straddles the borders of Switzerland and Italy.

The Matterhorn: Alive With Vibrational Energy

In a recent study, researchers found that the Matterhorn is constantly swaying to the seismic energy of earthquakes and ocean tremors felt around the world.

by |March 24, 2022