Tag Archives: seismology

The changing picture of the Martian core

Posted on October 26, 2023 by Chris Rowan

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

Earth’s inner core has an inner core?

Posted on February 25, 2023 by Chris Rowan

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

Spooky seismic action at a distance: moderate earthquakes in western US cause submarine landslides in the Gulf of Mexico

Posted on May 27, 2020 by Chris Rowan

This is such a cool study, and such an interesting result! Earthquakes triggering landslides is not a surprise, but surface waves from a magnitude 5.5 earthquake in the Gulf of California triggering a landslide in the Gulf of Mexico (1500 … Continue reading →

Categories: earthquakes, geohazards, paper reviews

An unremarkable year – seismically, anyway.

Posted on January 1, 2017 by Chris Rowan

Political pundits seem fond of geological metaphors such as ‘earthquake’, ‘seismic shift’, ‘tectonic shift’ and ‘tsunami’ – and they’ve certainly had plenty of reasons to use such metaphors in the past 12 months, as both my birth country and my … Continue reading →

Categories: earthquakes, geology, tectonics

We have a seismometer in our basement…

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Chris Rowan

Or, more accurately, my department does. And it rather handily picked up last week’s magnitude 8 earthquake near the Santa Cruz Islands (subject of the latest Friday Focal Mechanisms), all the way over in the southwest Pacific. Here’s the seismogram: … Continue reading →

Categories: earthquakes, geophysics