Archive for August 19th, 2012

Deep Earth Quakes

Deep earthquakes were discovered in the 1920s, but they remain a subject of contention today. The reason is simple: they aren’t supposed to happen. Yet they account for more than 20 percent of all earthquakes.Shallow earthquakes require solid rocks to occur—more specifically, cold, brittle rocks. Only these can store up elastic strain along a geologic fault, […]

300m-year-old forest preserved in ash :’Chinese Pompeii’

The researchers were able to “reconstruct” nearly 1,000 sq m of the forest’s trees and plant distributions. This rare insight into how the region once looked is described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The excavations sampled three sites across a large expanse that was covered with about a metre of ash. Due to […]