Category Archives: tectonics

Why did North Carolina experience a magnitude 5.1 earthquake yesterday?

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Chris Rowan

The location of this earthquake seems a little odd because North Carolina is about as far as it’s possible to get from an active plate boundary – thousands of km from the mid-Atlantic spreading ridge to the east and the … Continue reading →

Categories: earthquakes, geology, structures, tectonics

Marie Tharp’s Adventures in Mapping the Seafloor, In Her Own Words

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Chris Rowan

Establishing the rift valley and the mid-ocean ridge that went all the way around the world for 40,000 miles…You can’t find anything bigger than that, at least on this planet. Lots of cool science history in this first-person account, but also … Continue reading →

Categories: academic life, history of science, tectonics

Two reflections on the largest earthquake yet recorded, 60 years later.

Posted on May 26, 2020 by Chris Rowan

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 →

Categories: earthquakes, geohazards, tectonics

At subduction zones, feeding a complicated plate means you get complicated earthquake behaviour out

Posted on May 2, 2020 by Chris Rowan

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 →

Categories: earthquakes, paper reviews, tectonics

Can we detect plate tectonics on exoplanets?

Posted on January 2, 2020 by Chris Rowan

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 →

Categories: geology, planets, tectonics, volcanoes