Category Archives: geophysics

The changing picture of the Martian core

It’s now been almost a year since NASA’s InSight lander – home of the first seismograph ever deployed on Mars – was declared dead. But the picture of the Red Planet’s interior being deduced from the four years of seismic … Continue reading

Categories: geophysics, planets

Has Earth’s mantle always worked like it does today?

This seems to be the latest round in the eternal battle between the geophysics data which strongly suggests whole mantle convection (and for quite some time, if ideas about the origin of all the weird junk at the core-mantle boundary … Continue reading

Categories: deep time, geochemistry, geology, geophysics, past worlds

Earth’s inner core has an inner core?

We all know that the Earth’s mostly iron core is divided into a molten outer core and solid inner core. But that may not be the whole story: some just-published seismic data suggests that the Earth’s inner core is divided … Continue reading

Categories: earthquakes, geophysics

A deep origin for the Tohoku earthquake?

So if I’m reading this summary in Eos right, there is a new study suggesting that there was significant deformation of the subducted plate in the lead up to the M9 2011 Tohoku earthquake occurred – enough mass was redistributed to measurably … Continue reading

Categories: earthquakes, geohazards, geophysics, tectonics

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

Categories: geohazards, geophysics, volcanoes