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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.