July 2005

Pardon me for digging up some old articles, but I found two of them in the San Francisco Chronicle from June that are kind of interesting. (Hey! I need to make up for the fact that I didn’t post a single news item in June!) This one talks about a professor at UC Santa Cruz who is modeling how a tsunami would propogate down the Pacific Coast. This article talks about scientists are using deposits of sand that have been washed ashore during past tsunamis to help them model future events. To model the event’s effects, Ward assumes that in a huge quake on the Cascadia subduction zone, the two crustal plates would abruptly slip apart vertically by at least 50 feet in three successive blocks from south to north, generating a 9.2 magnitude quake. Aside from enormous quake damage on land for hundreds of miles, Ward estimates the resulting tsunami would pile a wave more than 20 feet high crashing onto the Oregon-Washington coast, inundating Seattle and the entire Puget Sound region as well as Portland and the mouth of the Columbia River.

U.S.G.S. researchers have examined the occurrence of of MTBE in ground water supplies through out the United States, concluding that the highest concentrations of MTBE is in shallow ground water beneath urban areas. The fear is that these contaminated waters can percolate down into aquifers where much of our drinking water comes from. MTBE was detected as frequently as some other chemicals that have been used for longer periods of time. MTBE was detected more frequently in urban areas compared to other land use types, such as agricultural areas, putting shallow ground water supply in these areas at risk for contamination.

CNN has posted a news article on how the sounds of the December 2004 Sumatra Earthquake were captured on hydroacoustic microphones run by the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO Preparatory Commission). Of course CNN fails to post a link to this sound file. If I find one, I’ll post it. “It’s really quite an eerie sound to hear the earth ripping apart like that. We hear it on smaller earthquakes quite frequently but something of this scale that goes on for eight minutes is very much unprecedented,” said Maya Tolstoy, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Also of note is how these hydroacoustic microphones can possibly be used in the future for earthquake analysis and tsunami warning systems.

The European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission has been returning highly detailed and beautiful pictures of Mars, thanks to the stereo cameras the spacecraft is equipped with. A recent article in Universe Today highlights a new image of the Nicholson Crater on Mars. This crater is 100 km (62 km) across and has a very large raised central mount. Large craters often have this kind of central peak, which forms when material rebounds after a meteor impact, but Nicholson Crater’s peak is heavily eroded by wind and water.

Alright, I think I’m going to break categories down by subject, rather than whether or not something is “News” or “Research.” So we should start to see things such as Earthquakes and Seismology, Paleontology, Oceans and Climate, and perhaps some others.

Feel free to add any suggestions in the comments.