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- 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
Category Archives: tectonics
Two reflections on the largest earthquake yet recorded, 60 years later.
It has been 60 years since a magnitude 9.5 earthquake struck the Chilean coast near Valdivia. The stats for this earthquake remain pretty mind-blowing even today. It is still the largest earthquake ever recorded – over 20% of the Earth’s seismic energy … Continue reading
At subduction zones, feeding a complicated plate means you get complicated earthquake behaviour out
What drives the occurrence of slow-slip events on subduction zones: “earthquakes”: that involve strain release over days and weeks rather than seconds? A new paper…doesn’t really answer that question, but it shows why it’s so complicated to answer. The study uses … Continue reading
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
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again: an introduction to How the Earth Works
For a couple of years now, I’ve been telling a story at the beginning of the introductory geology course I teach, called How the Earth Works. I like to think it gives a flavour of the kinds of stories you can tell about the Earth, if you know how to look: stories of how the world slowly remakes itself over hundreds of millions of years, of how the very high was once the very low, and will be again. This is that story. Continue reading
A Seismic Summary of 2017
Why 2017 was a quiet year – and an examination of the provocative hypothesis that 2018 may not be. Continue reading
