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Recent Posts
- The Cuyahoga River burned today for the first time in 51 years. Here’s what we can learn from it.
- Spooky seismic action at a distance: moderate earthquakes in western US cause submarine landslides in the Gulf of Mexico
- Two reflections on the largest earthquake yet recorded, 60 years later.
- Watershed Hydrology – Complete Compendium of my Online Teaching Resources
- How I taught Flooding online in Spring 2020
- How I taught Streamflow online in Spring 2020
- How I taught Streamflow Generation online in Spring 2020
- How I taught Soil Moisture and Infiltration online in spring 2020
Latest Comments
- On How wet is the unsaturated zone?:
- John Selker: For lot’s more videos on soil moisture topics, see Drs Selker and Or’s text-book... Read
- Chris Rowan: Actually, a (fortunately small) tsunami was generated in the aftermath of the quake:... Read
- Anthony: Wow Chris this was the most excellent explanation of recent Kilauea activity i could find – so... Read
- Lyle: Note 50 years is the average lifetime of a commercial building a single family home tends more to the 75... Read
- Eric J. Fielding: Great blog post! Only suggestion is that the Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast... Read
- Tor B: Hmmm, I refreshed the page and the ‘last parent standing’ changed, but then settled back to... Read
- Tor B: Nice graphics, but the last purple ‘atom’ is always fourth from the right on the top row. I... Read
Author Archives: Chris Rowan
Can we detect plate tectonics on exoplanets?
As celebrated in this Ars Technica piece, the 2010s was ‘the decade of the exoplanet’. Largely thanks to the Kepler telescope, the past ten years has seen an explosion in exoplanet discoveries. More than 4000 planets have now been identified orbiting other stars, … Continue reading
New sonar data from around Anak Kratatau constrain size of December 2018 collapse
BBC story here. These data indicate a smaller collapse, but also a shallower failure plane than expected, which allowed that smaller volume to still generate a devastating tsunami. Basically, when modelling this, different combinations of slide volume and failure angle … Continue reading
Oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere may not have required a trigger event after all
In Earth history, there have been 3 abrupt jumps in atmospheric oxygen. A evolutionary or tectonic trigger is usually invoked, but a new study just published in Science suggests all you need is gradual oxidation of earth’s surface plus feedbacks … Continue reading
Earthquakes of 2018
Just as I did in 2016 and 2017, I thought I’d begin the new year with a look back at the earthquake activity in the last. According to the catalogue maintained by the USGS, the Earth’s ever-grinding tectonic plates produced … Continue reading
Earthquake prediction is a fool’s errand
If you want to make earthquake scientists jumpy, all you need to do is ask, "can you predict the next earthquake?" In fact, any variation on the theme of ‘earthquake’ and ‘prediction’ will do – unless it is one which … Continue reading
