GEOLOGY WITH JEFF SIMPSON
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Months of Gravity Changes Preceded the Tōhoku Earthquake

9/19/2022

 
Earthquakes caused by subducting tectonic plates can be highly destructive events. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake caused immense damage to population centers in eastern Japan. Constant monitoring of faulted regions with seismographs and space geodesy measurements can indicate when land deformations are occurring in shallow or surficial systems, giving researchers a hand with hazard mitigation work. But for subduction zones, much of the deformation occurs deep within Earth, making it difficult to detect on the surface. - EOS
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A magnetic field reversal 42,000 years ago may have contributed to mass extinctions

4/7/2022

 
A flip-flop of Earth’s magnetic poles between 42,000 and 41,000 years ago briefly but dramatically shrank the magnetic field’s strengthand may have triggered a cascade of environmental crises on Earth, a new study suggests. With the help of new, precise carbon dating obtained from ancient tree fossils, the researchers correlated shifts in climate patterns, large mammal extinctions and even changes in human behavior just before and during the Laschamps excursion, a brief reversal of the magnetic poles that lasted less than a thousand years. It’s the first study to directly link a magnetic pole reversal to large-scale environmental changes. - Science
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Melting of polar ice shifting Earth itself, not just sea levels

10/24/2021

 
The melting of polar ice is not only shifting the levels of our oceans, it is changing the planet Earth itself. Newly minted Ph.D. Sophie Coulson and her colleagues explained in a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters that as glacial ice from Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic Islands melts, Earth's crust beneath these land masses warps, an impact that can be measured hundreds and perhaps thousands of miles away. "Scientists have done a lot of work directly beneath ice sheets and glaciers," said Coulson, who did her work in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and received her doctorate in May from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. "So they knew that it would define the region where the glaciers are, but they hadn't realized that it was global in scale." By analyzing satellite data on melt from 2003 to 2018 and studying changes in Earth's crust, Coulson and her colleagues were able to measure the shifting of the crust horizontally. Their research, which was highlighted in Nature, found that in some places the crust was moving more horizontally than it was lifting. In addition to the surprising extent of its reach, the Nature brief pointed out, this research provides a potentially new way to monitor modern ice mass changes. - Phys.Org

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