Earthquake damage to buildings is mainly due to the existing shear waves which transfer their energy during an earthquake to the houses. These shear waves are significantly influenced by the underground and the topography of the surrounding area. Detailed knowledge of the landform and the near-surface underground structure is, therefore, an important prerequisite for a […]
Archive for August, 2013
Earthquakes and Tectonics: First Direct Observation of Subducting Continental Crust During the Collision of Two Continents
August 31st, 2013 
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First Known Feeding Trace of the Eocene Bottom-Dwelling Fish Notogoneus osculus and Its Paleontological Significance
August 30th, 2013 Riffin The Green River Formation (early Eocene, about 42–53 Ma) at and near Fossil Butte National Monument in Wyoming, USA, is world famous for its exquisitely preserved freshwater teleost fish in the former Fossil Lake. Nonetheless, trace fossils attributed to fish interacting with the lake bottom are apparently rare, and have not been associated directly with […]
Supervolcanic Ash Can Turn to Lava Miles from Eruption
August 29th, 2013 Riffin Supervolcanoes, such as the one sitting dormant under Yellowstone National Park, are capable of producing eruptions thousands of times more powerful than normal volcanic eruptions. While they only happen every several thousand years, these eruptions have the potential to kill millions of people and animals due to the massive amount of heat and ash they […]
New 3-D Earth Model More Accurately Pinpoints Source of Earthquakes, Explosions
August 28th, 2013 Riffin During the Cold War, U.S. and international monitoring agencies could spot nuclear tests and focused on measuring their sizes. Today, they’re looking around the globe to pinpoint much smaller explosives tests. Under the sponsorship of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation R&D, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory have […]
Computer Simulations Indicate Calcium Carbonate Has a Dense Liquid Phase
August 24th, 2013 Riffin Computer simulations conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) could help scientists make sense of a recently observed and puzzling wrinkle in one of nature’s most important chemical processes. It turns out that calcium carbonate — the ubiquitous compound that is a major component of seashells, limestone, concrete, antacids […]
New Bird Fossil Hints at More Undiscovered Chinese Treasures
August 23rd, 2013 Riffin The study of Mesozoic birds and the dinosaur-bird transition is one of the most exciting and vigorous fields in vertebrate paleontology today. A newly described bird from the Jehol Biota of northeast China suggests that scientists have only tapped a small proportion of the birds and dinosaurs that were living at that time, and that […]
Rising Mountains, Cooling Oceans Prompted Spread of Invasive Species 450 Million Years Ago
August 22nd, 2013 Riffin New Ohio University research suggests that the rise of an early phase of the Appalachian Mountains and cooling oceans allowed invasive species to upset the North American ecosystem 450 million years ago. The study, published recently in the journal PLOS ONE, took a closer look at a dramatic ecological shift captured in the fossil record […]
Ancient Cycads Found to Be Pre-Adapted to Grow in Groves
August 21st, 2013 Riffin The ancient cycad lineage has been around since before the age of the dinosaurs. More recently, cycads also co-existed with large herbivorous mammals, such as the ice age megafauna that only went extinct a few tens of thousands of years ago. Cycads that are living today have large, heavy seeds with a fleshy outer coating […]
Extinct Ancient Ape Did Not Walk Like a Human, Study Shows
August 20th, 2013 Riffin According to a new study, led by University of Texas at Austin anthropologists Gabrielle A. Russo and Liza Shapiro, a 9- to 7-million-year-old ape from Italy did not, in fact, walk habitually on two legs. The findings refute a long body of evidence, suggesting that Oreopithecus had the capabilities for bipedal (moving on two legs) […]
Ancient Mammal Relatives Cast Light On Recovery After Mass Extinction
August 19th, 2013 Riffin As growing numbers of species in the modern world face extinction because of global climate change, habitat destruction, and over-exploitation, scientists have turned to the fossil record to understand how mass extinctions in the past proceeded, and how species and ecosystems recovered in the aftermath of such events. Much work so far suggests that the […]
