Posts Tagged ‘WFS’

Western Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami Hazard Potential Greater Than Previously Thought

Earthquakes similar in magnitude to the 2004 Sumatra earthquake could occur in an area beneath the Arabian Sea at the Makran subduction zone, according to recent research published in Geophysical Research Letters. The research was carried out by scientists from the University of Southampton based at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton (NOCS), and the Pacific […]

Cockroaches Probably Cleaned Up after Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs undoubtedly produced huge quantities of excrements. But who cleaned up after them? Dung beetles and flies with rapid development were rare during most of the Mesozoic. Candidates for these duties are extinct cockroaches (Blattulidae), whose temporal range is associated with herbivorous dinosaurs. An opportunity to test this hypothesis arises from coprolites to some extent […]

Why beaks evolved in some theropod dinosaurs and what their function : New Study

Why beaks evolved in some theropod dinosaurs and what their function might have been is the subject of new research by an international team of palaeontologists published this week in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). Beaks are a typical hallmark of modern birds and can be found in a huge variety of […]

Expedition to Undersea Mountain Yields New Information About Sub-Seafloor Structure

Scientists recently concluded an expedition aboard the research vessel JOIDES Resolution to learn more about Atlantis Massif, an undersea mountain, or seamount, that formed in a very different way than the majority of the seafloor in the oceans. Unlike volcanic seamounts, which are made of the basalt that’s typical of most of the seafloor, Atlantis […]

Deep-Sea Study Reveals Cause of 2011 Tsunami: Unusually Thin, Slippery Geological Fault Found

The devastating tsunami that struck Japan’s Tohoku region in March 2011 was touched off by a submarine earthquake far more massive than anything geologists had expected in that zone. Now, a team of scientists including McGill University geologist Christie Rowe, has published a set of studies in the journal Science that shed light on what […]

New Way To Monitor Faults May Help Predict Earthquakes

Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have found a way to monitor the strength of geologic faults deep in the Earth. This finding could prove to be a boon for earthquake prediction by pinpointing those faults that are likely to fail and produce earthquakes. Until now, scientists had no method for detecting changes in fault strength, […]

Niassodon mfumukasi fossil Reveals New Data On Ancient Mammal Relatives

In the remote province of Niassa, Mozambique, a new species and genus of fossil vertebrate was found. The species is a distant relative of living mammals and is approximately 256 million years old. This new species belongs to a group of animals called synapsids. Synapsida includes a number of extinct lineages that dominated the communities […]

What Drives Aftershocks?

On 27 February 2010 an earthquake of magnitude 8.8 struck South-Central Chile near the town of Maule. The main shock displaced the subduction interface by up to 16 meters. Like usually after strong earthquakes a series of aftershocks occurred in the region with decreasing size over the next months. A surprising result came from an […]

Western Ghats: life line of india need world attention for protection

The Western Ghats or the Sahyādri constitute a mountain range along the western side of India. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is one of the eight “hottest hotspots” of biological diversity in the world. It is sometimes called the Great Escarpment of India. The range runs north to south along the western […]

‘Cascade of events’ caused sudden explosion of animal life

The explosion of animal life on Earth around 520 million years ago was the result of a combination of interlinked factors rather than a single underlying cause, according to a new study. Dozens of individual theories have been put forward over the past few decades for this rapid diversification of animal species in the early […]