A reader by the name of Ron submitted this New York Times (free registration required) obituary yesterday on the passing of Dr. Bruce A. Bolt, an Australian seismologist known for his work in California and his advocacy for improving earthquake safety. Dr. Bolt advised on the strengthening of the Golden Gate Bridge and studied the destructive San Francisco earthquake of 1906 in making recommendations to engineers for improving the resilience of the city’s buildings. He also conducted ground-motion studies for the designs of dams, oil pipelines, nuclear reactors and underground train systems.
Submerged volcanoes in the South Pacific can erupt at any time, and are apparently the source of a very dangerous tsunami hazard according to a new study done by researchers at Australian National University. “Over the last six years, research teams from Australia, New Zealand, the USA, and Germany have mapped a relatively narrow strip of ocean stretching about 2000 kilometres from the north of New Zealand to Tonga, and found 75 previously unknown volcanoes. Only 10 volcanoes were known in the area prior to this research,” he said. “If any one of these underwater volcanoes either explosively erupts or collapses in a sudden movement, it would have a massive impact on the ocean, triggering a tsunami which could devastate communities across the region. There is evidence from new high-resolution images of these volcanoes that these events have happened many times in the past.
Dinosaur embryos found 30 years ago in South Africa have been dated at 190 million years old. According to the Physorg.com article, this pushes back the dates of some of the earliest known dinosaurs and land vertebrates by 100 million years. “It is also the oldest known embryo of any land-living animal, pushing back the boundary by about 100 million years, as the oldest known recognisable embryos date back about 90 million years,” Raath told a press conference at the university to announce the discovery. [...] The journey of this discovery dates back nearly 30 years when a cluster of seven eggs were found by South African palaeontological legend James Kitching around 1977 next to a newly-made road at Golden Gate national park in central South Africa. Raath said the fossils were “lying on the shelf” at Wits University as there were nobody with the training and skill to remove the rock from the eggs and embryos which are only a few centimetres long.
New research about the carbon cycle in the Amazon River shows that carbon dioxide is released back into the Earth’s atmosphere much faster than scientists have expected. This has interesting implication on global warming calculations and dealing with carbon sequestration. The rivers of South America’s Amazon basin are “breathing” far harder - and cycling the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide far faster - than anyone realized. Most of the carbon being exhaled as carbon dioxide from Amazonian rivers and wetlands has spent a mere five years sequestered in the trees, plants and soils of the surrounding landscape, researchers report in the July 28 issue of the journal Nature.
A graduate student at Brown University has published a paper showing that there is a sharp divide between the lithosphere (the rigid upper crust that we live on) and the asthenosphere (a pliable layer), according to data gathered from various seismic networks. Catherine Rychert and colleagues discovered that sound waves recorded by the sensors slow considerably about 90 to 110 kilometers below ground – a sign that the rock is getting weaker and that the lithosphere is giving way to the asthenosphere. Within in a distance of a mere 11 kilometers – roughly 7 miles or less – the transition is complete. This evidence runs contrary to the prevailing notion that the lithosphere-asthenosphere transition is a gradual one. It also points up the fact that temperature alone cannot define the boundary.