From University of Texas at Austin via COSMOS: “The rocks below a famous crater”

From University of Texas at Austin

via

COSMOS Magazine

10 September 2019
Richard A Lovett

Geologists examine what unfolded after that asteroid hit.

Artist’s impression of the Chicxulub crater, showing the peak ring. Credit D. VAN RAVENSWAAY/SPL

Scientists drilling into the heart of the Chicxulub impact crater in the Gulf of Mexico have discovered 130 metres of sediments laid down within hours after the site was struck by the asteroid widely believed to have killed off the dinosaurs.

In part, it’s exciting because of the link to the dinosaurs. But it also gives geologists a chance to watch how events unfolded on a time scale of minutes to hours, says Sean Gulick, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin, as opposed to thousands or millions of years, “which is what normal geology would look like”.

The Chicxulub crater was formed 66 million years ago when a 10-kilometre-wide asteroid or comet ploughed into the ocean near what is now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

In 2016, Gulick co-led a team from the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) that drilled into the 200-kilometre wide crater in an effort to better understand its history.

The site they chose was a portion of the now-buried crater’s peak ring, formed when the impact caused rock from deep beneath the surface to splash upward, forming a plateau near the crater’s centre.

However, because the ocean at that time was hundreds of metres deep, the peak ring never rose above sea level.

Not that the impact zone was immediately submerged. Initially, the blast drove the water away, leaving a zone of molten rock known as impact melt – now solidified into lava.

But soon, the water came rushing back. At first, Gulick says, it hit the impact melt and exploded into steam, creating about 10 metres of shattered rock, just above the now-solidified impact melt.

That was followed by 80 to 90 metres of gravel-like sediments, with the larger gravel at the bottom and the smaller at the top. The only way that could have happened, he says, is if the waters rushed back so quickly that they were still full of rocks from the blast – rocks that then settled to the bottom: big ones first, smaller ones later.

There are also signs, he says, that the water sloshed around within the crater, like bathwater in a tub. Then came a 10-centimetre layer of gravel-sized material that appears to have been created by the disturbance of the sea floor by a fast-moving wave: i.e., a tsunami.

Gulick thinks it was created when the outrushing waters from the impact reflected off the nearest landmass – which at the time would have been mountains in central Mexico, 800 kilometres away – then came back to deposit sediments on top of the 130 metres of rocks already deposited in the aftermath of the impact.

Support from this, he says, comes from the fact that these deposits contain perylene, a chemical made only in soils. That, he says, “would require land, somewhere, to have been touched by water that then came rushing back”.

None of this means the Chicxulub impact killed the dinosaurs. Others have argued that climate-changing volcanism in India may instead have been the culprit.

But Gulick’s samples also contain charcoal in the layers directly above the tsunami deposits, suggesting that the impact may have set off massive wildfires. “We knew impacts can make wildfires,” he says. “But this is direct evidence that this happened at ground zero.”

In addition, the rocks returning to the crater after the impact were low in sulfur, even though geologists knew that about one-third of the ones in the impact area initially contained sulfur-rich minerals like gypsum or anhydrite.

The sulfur from these rocks must therefore have been vaporised by the impact, Gulick says.

And when it mixed with vaporised ocean water, it would have filled the upper atmosphere with hundreds of gigatons of sulfate aerosols, creating a bright haze that would have dropped global temperatures by more than 25 degrees Celsius, “putting most of the world below freeing for most of the year” – and possibly lasting for “a decade or two”.

A portion of the drilled cores from the rocks that filled the crater. Credit International Ocean Discovery Program

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

U Texas at Austin

U Texas Austin campus

In 1839, the Congress of the Republic of Texas ordered that a site be set aside to meet the state’s higher education needs. After a series of delays over the next several decades, the state legislature reinvigorated the project in 1876, calling for the establishment of a “university of the first class.” Austin was selected as the site for the new university in 1881, and construction began on the original Main Building in November 1882. Less than one year later, on Sept. 15, 1883, The University of Texas at Austin opened with one building, eight professors, one proctor, and 221 students — and a mission to change the world. Today, UT Austin is a world-renowned higher education, research, and public service institution serving more than 51,000 students annually through 18 top-ranked colleges and schools.

From The New York Times: “We’re Barely Listening to the U.S.’s Most Dangerous Volcanoes”

From The New York Times

Sept. 9, 2019
Shannon Hall

A thicket of red tape and regulations have made it difficult for volcanologists to build monitoring stations along Mount Hood and other active volcanoes.

Mount Hood in Oregon is one of 161 active volcanoes in the United States, many of them in the Pacific Northwest’s Cascade Range.Credit Amanda Lucier for The New York Times

Seth Moran is worried about Mount Hood.

In the 1780s, the volcano rumbled to life with such force that it sent high-speed avalanches of hot rock, gas and ash down its slopes. Those flows quickly melted the snow and ice and mixed with the meltwater to create violent slurries as thick as concrete that traveled huge distances. They destroyed everything in their path.

Today, the volcano, a prominent backdrop against Portland, Ore., is eerily silent. But it won’t stay that way.

Mount Hood remains an active volcano — meaning that it will erupt again. And when it does, it could unleash mudflows not unlike those from Colombia’s Nevado del Ruiz volcano in 1985. There, a mudflow entombed the town of Armero, killing roughly 21,000 people in the dead of night.

On Mount Hood, “any little thing that happens could have a big consequence,” said Dr. Moran, scientist-in-charge at the federal Cascades Volcano Observatory.

And yet the volcano is hardly monitored. If scientists miss early warning signs of an eruption, they might not know the volcano is about to blow until it’s too late.

Determined to avoid such a tragedy, Dr. Moran and his colleagues proposed installing new instruments on the flanks of Mount Hood in 2014. Those include three seismometers to measure earthquakes, three GPS instruments to chart ground deformation and one instrument to monitor gas emissions at four different locations on the mountain.

But they quickly hit a major hiccup: The monitoring sites are in wilderness areas, meaning that the use of the land is tightly restricted. It took five years before the Forest Service granted the team approval in August.

The approval is a promising step forward, but Dr. Moran and his colleagues still face limitations, including potential legal action that may block their work.

Such obstacles are a problem across the United States where most volcanoes lack adequate monitoring. Although federal legislation passed in March could help improve the monitoring of volcanoes like Mount Hood, scientists remain concerned that red tape could continue to leave them blind to future eruptions, with deadly consequences.

Listening for rumbles and belches

The United States is home to 161 active volcanoes, many of which form a line along the west coast through California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska. Seven of the 10 most dangerous American volcanoes are within the Cascade Range, and six of those are not adequately monitored.

In contrast, countries like Japan, Iceland and Chile smother their high-threat volcanoes in scientific instruments.

“The U.S. really doesn’t have anything to this level,” said Erik Klemetti, a volcanologist at Denison University in Ohio.

Yet there is no question that better monitoring could save lives. Volcanoes don’t typically erupt without warning. As Mount St. Helens awoke in May 1980, a series of small earthquakes could be felt on the surface nearby. Shortly thereafter, the volcano started to deform. Steam explosions sculpted a new crater, while a bulge emerged on the volcano’s north flank. Earthquakes continued, landslides rumbled and ash-rich plumes erupted — all before the main event.

Mount St. Helens awoke in May 1980. OregonLive.com

Although not all volcanoes follow such a steady, pre-eruptive pattern, they typically either tremble, deform or belch volcanic gases — meaning that if scientists monitor these three signals, they will likely be able to forecast when a volcanic eruption will happen.

Take Hawaii as an example. Shortly after earthquakes picked up at the Kilauea volcano on April 30, 2018, scientists at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory could tell that they were not only increasing, but they were also propagating to the east.

Kilauea volcano on April 30, 2018. Lava flowing on May 6 through the Leilani Estates subdivision. Credit Bruce Omori/EPA, via Shutterstock.

“That was not only cool, it was vital for emergency management,” Dr. Moran said.

Scientists used those signals to project where magma might erupt, and planners evacuated residents in that area. The eruption destroyed more than 700 homes, but remarkably no one died.

And it was all thanks to 60 seismic stations located across the island.

“Without those instruments, we would have been blind,” said Tina Neal, the scientist-in-charge at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. “While we would have known something was happening, we would have been less able to give guidance about where and what was likely to happen.”

Nature’s Bill of Rights

Dr. Moran and his colleagues had that example in mind as they pressed their case for adding instruments to Mount Hood.

They submitted a proposal to the Forest Service in 2014. But the instruments — which will be housed in four-feet-tall boxes with radio antennas and solar panels on the outside — violate the Wilderness Act, which prohibits any new structures and even noise pollution within federal wilderness areas.

“I see the Wilderness Act as nature’s bill of rights,” said George Nickas, the executive director of Wilderness Watch, a conservation group that opposed volcano monitoring in federal wilderness. “I think it is so important to have places like that where we can just step back, out of respect and humility, and appreciate nature for what it is.”

In reviewing Dr. Moran’s proposal, the Forest Service provided the public with an opportunity to comment, during which they received more than 2,000 statements — most of which agreed that the wilderness needs safeguarding.

U.S.G.S. volcano monitoring equipment, right, on Mount St. Helens. Credit Amanda Lucier for The New York Times.

Fiberglass enclosures for volcano monitoring equipment awaiting placement on Mount Hood. Credit Amanda Lucier for The New York Times.

When Mount St. Helens first began to rumble, scientists couldn’t tell if the quakes originated under the volcano itself or at a nearby fault. Scientists rushed to place additional instruments and within days they knew the volcano itself was shaking. Credit Amanda Lucier for The New York Times.

To Jonathan Fink, a geologist at Portland State University who also wrote a public comment in favor of volcano monitoring, this argument is misplaced.

“I’m all for protecting wilderness,” Dr. Fink said. “But this is just a question of public safety. And I think letting a helicopter in to put some instruments in that can then be monitored remotely seems like a pretty minor exception to the wilderness policies.”

Even so, many critics argue that we can’t make even a single exception — or there won’t be wilderness at all.

“It’s not wilderness if you have structures, if you have roads, if you have motorization,” said Gary Macfarlane, Wilderness Watch’s president. “In fact, it’s antithetical to the whole idea of wilderness.”

Lessons from Mount St. Helens

Other critics say the project is far from necessary. “If we can do something like land one of those landers on Mars, we can move a few miles back from a volcanic feature and monitor it from a little further away,” said Bernie Smith, a retired employee of the Forest Service who wrote a public comment against the project.

But Dr. Moran and others argue that the work is not possible unless they get up close, and before the volcano begins to rock.

“The name of the game is to be able to detect and correctly interpret these warning signs as soon as possible — to give society as much time as possible to get ready,” Dr. Moran said.

When Mount St. Helens first began to rumble, scientists couldn’t tell if the quakes originated under the volcano itself or five miles away at a nearby fault. They only had one seismometer two miles to the west of the volcano. So they rushed to place more instruments on its slopes (a risk that would not be allowed today) and within days they knew the volcano itself was shaking.

“Looking back on it, it’s really miraculous that they were able to do what they did,” Dr. Moran said.

The Calbuco volcano erupting in southern Chile on April 22, 2015. Credit Diego Main/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Scientists have since learned that we don’t always get as much time as Mount St. Helens allowed. At Calbuco, a volcano in southern Chile that’s similar to the volcanoes in the Cascades, all was quiet during the early afternoon of April 22, 2015. But tremors began in the late afternoon, and by 6:04 p.m. local time, the mountain was sending a plume of gas 10 miles into the sky.

With such a narrow window, the first line of defense is to have a solid monitoring network in place whenever a volcano awakens.

“You’re going to either get in there ahead of time and put in the instrumentation you need, or you’re just going to accept that you’re going to go blind into the entire eruptive period and whatever happens, happens,” said Jacob Lowenstern, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey.

Not if, but when

Although none of these volcanoes appear to be building toward an eruption today, there is no question that they pose a serious hazard.

“The U.S.G.S. has a deep understanding that these volcanoes are going to erupt again — within our lifetimes, our children’s lifetimes,” said Carolyn Driedger, a hydrologist at the Cascades observatory. “The evidence is all there.”

Beyond Mount Hood, Mount Rainier near Seattle could also unleash viscous volcanic mudflows. There, 80,000 people live in the path of disaster and yet the mountain only has 19 instruments, which scientists say is not enough given its vast size.

Aerial photo of Mount Rainier from the west. Stan Shebs

And even volcanoes that don’t loom so close to populated areas could have far-reaching effects.

Glacier Peak in northern Washington has produced some of the most explosive eruptions in the contiguous United States, meaning the ability to throw enough ash into the air to halt air traffic for days or even weeks and cost billions of dollars. It has only one seismometer.

Glacier Peak. Walter Siegmund

Andy Lockhart, a geophysicist at the Cascades observatory, working on a tripwire for part of a system to detect debris flow to be placed on Mount Rainier. Credit Amanda Lucier for The New York Times.

Seismometers at the Cascades Volcano Observatory awaiting placement on Mount Hood. Credit Amanda Lucier for The New York Times.

Without equipment to detect the eruption, airplane passengers just might find themselves living a high-altitude nightmare. In 1989, a Boeing 747 flew through an undetected ash cloud in Alaska. All four engines shut down and the airplane went into a nose-dive. It descended 13,000 feet before the pilots were able to restart the engines. Hundreds of thousands of people fly across the West Coast and above active volcanoes every day.

Eruptions in Alaska and California would also be felt across the nation. Anchorage is a major cargo hub, meaning that many FedEx or U.P.S. packages travel through Alaska. But an eruption might bring that to an alarming halt. And because California produces a large portion of the nation’s food, an eruption might limit the fruits and vegetables found at supermarkets as far as the East Coast.

“We’re not just doing this for academic purposes. This is so we can give good information to emergency managers,” Dr. Driedger said. “That’s the end in all of this.”

Hoping for slumber

Despite the permit’s recent approval, Dr. Driedger notes that there are still a number of steps before any instruments can be placed on Mount Hood. They will now have to choreograph the assembly of instruments, hire personnel and schedule helicopter trips around weather and other potential obstacles.

Moreover, the Forest Service and the observatory could still face a legal challenge from Wilderness Watch or other groups that adds years to the installation, if not blocking it altogether.

“This is more proof that the Forest Service has abandoned any pretense of administering wilderness as per the letter or spirit of the Wilderness Act,” said Mr. Macfarlane, whose group is discussing litigation with an attorney but has not yet decided whether to file suit.

And then there is more work to be done monitoring other hazardous volcanoes beyond Mount Hood.

Volcanologists across the nation were pleased this March when Congress passed the National Volcano Early Warning and Monitoring System Act, which seeks to ensure that volcanoes nationwide are adequately monitored.

But the bill is only an authorization — meaning that Congress has not actually invested the $55 million over five years required to apply for new permits, install more equipment and pay to monitor 34 of the nation’s most dangerous volcanoes. Nor will it change the fact that scientists like Dr. Moran must still grapple with regulations protecting federal wilderness.

So Dr. Moran, aware that litigation is a possibility, is moving forward with caution. This month, his team will begin to install monitoring stations at Mount Hood. He then hopes the Forest Service will issue a permit to install equipment at Glacier Peak, then turn back to Washington’s Mount Baker. Eventually he would like to install more instruments on Mount Hood, but first he needs to create sufficient networks elsewhere.

While they wait, Dr. Moran and his colleagues will hold their breath, hopeful that these volcanoes stay in a deep slumber, but aware that one just might rouse at any moment.

Location is not identified. Amanda Lucier for The New York Times.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

From University of Utah: “Utah’s red rock metronome”

From University of Utah

Seismic readings reveal Castleton Tower’s unseen vibrations

Aug. 27, 2019

Jeff Moore, assistant professor of geology and geophysics
Office: 801-585-0491
jeff.moore@utah.edu

Paul Gabrielsen science writer, University Marketing & Communications
Office: 801-585-6861
Mobile: 801-505-8253
paul.gabrielsen@utah.edu

At about the same rate that your heart beats, a Utah rock formation called Castleton Tower gently vibrates, keeping time and keeping watch over the sandstone desert. Swaying like a skyscraper, the red rock tower taps into the deep vibrations in the earth—wind, waves and far-off earthquakes.

New research from University of Utah geologists details the natural vibration of the tower, measured with the help of two skilled rock climbers. Understanding how this and other natural rock forms vibrate, they say, helps us keep an eye (or ear) on their structural health and helps us understand how human-made vibrations affect seemingly unmovable rocks. The results are published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

“We often view such grand and prominent landforms as permanent features of our landscape, when in reality, they are continuously moving and evolving,” says Riley Finnegan, a graduate student and co-author on the paper.

“A stoic power”

Castleton Tower is a spire of Wingate Sandstone nearly 400 feet (120 m) tall that stands over Utah’s Castle Valley. First climbed in 1961, Castleton Tower became a widely renowned classic destination after appearing as one of two Utah climbs in the 1979 book Fifty Classic Climbs of North America. It’s one of the largest freestanding rock towers.

“Most people are in awe of its static stability, in its dramatic freestanding nature perched at the end of a ridge overlooking Castle Valley,” says geologist Jeff Moore, who led the study. “It has a kind of stoic power in its appearance.”

Moore and his colleagues study the vibrations of rock structures, including arches and bridges, to understand what natural forces act on these structures. They also measure the rocks’ resonance, or the way the structures amplify the energy that passes through them. Sources of this energy can be as local as wind gusts or traffic on a nearby road or as distant as far-off earthquakes and even ocean waves. “Because nothing is truly static, there is always energy propagating throughout the earth, which serves as a constant vibration source for the rock,” Finnegan says.

Moore, Finnegan and graduate student Paul Geimer have been developing and refining their methods of measuring rock structures as they’ve surveyed arches, bridges and hoodoos, which are small spire-like formations—towers on a smaller scale. They use seismometers to measure even the slightest movement in three dimensions. For some of their measurements, they’ve sped up the low-frequency seismic data into audible sound—allowing you to listen to the voice of a rock.

As part of the research, Geimer has led an effort to collect 3-D imagery of the rock structures to precisely measure the rocks’ dimensions—helping the researchers learn even more about what makes these rocks rumble.

“As of just a few years ago there were almost no measurements of the kind in existence,” Moore says, “so every feature we measure is something new.”

“Something we couldn’t just walk up to”

Placing a seismometer at the top of Castleton Tower, however, required someone ascending to the top to install and retrieve the equipment. Fortunately, two professional climbers on a seasonal break from their employment offered their skills and equipment. “They were all in.” Moore says. The research team jumped at the chance.

To get the needed data, the climbers trekked to the base of the tower and placed a seismometer to serve as a reference. Geimer says that on the day of the experiment, in March 2018, the weather was good and the climbing route up the popular tower was filled with a consistent stream of climbers. “I can imagine both anxiety and excitement levels spiked when the team walked away from the reference and began the climb to the top,” Geimer says, “knowing that it would be hours before returning safely to the base and verifying a successful measurement.”

The climbers carried another heavy seismometer to the top and ran measurements for three hours before returning both instruments to the research team. “Their skills provided us an opportunity to measure something we couldn’t just walk up to,” Finnegan says.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Utah (also referred to as the U, the U of U, or Utah) is a public coeducational space-grant research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. As the state’s flagship university, the university offers more than 100 undergraduate majors and more than 92 graduate degree programs. The university is classified in the highest ranking: “R-1: Doctoral Universities – Highest Research Activity” by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The Carnegie Classification also considers the university as “selective”, which is its second most selective admissions category. Graduate studies include the S.J. Quinney College of Law and the School of Medicine, Utah’s only medical school. As of Fall 2015, there are 23,909 undergraduate students and 7,764 graduate students, for an enrollment total of 31,673.

The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret (Listeni/dɛz.əˈrɛt./[12]) by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah’s oldest institution of higher education.It received its current name in 1892, four years before Utah attained statehood, and moved to its current location in 1900.

The university ranks among the top 50 U.S. universities by total research expenditures with over $486 million spent in 2014. 22 Rhodes Scholars,[14] three Nobel Prize winners, two Turing Award winners, three MacArthur Fellows, various Pulitzer Prize winners, two astronauts, Gates Cambridge Scholars, and Churchill Scholars have been affiliated with the university as students, researchers, or faculty members in its history. In addition, the university’s Honors College has been reviewed among 50 leading national Honors Colleges in the U.S. The university has also been ranked the 12th most ideologically diverse university in the country.

From Michigan Technical University: “Geohazards on the Horizon”

From Michigan Technical University

August 23, 2019
Jen A. Miller

There’s a method to my disaster management.

India is in a unique position with climate change. It’s a densely populated country that is prone to geohazards like earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides and floods. Because of that density, one disaster can hurt a lot of people, as happened in August of this year when a mudslide in southern India killed 66 people and displaced at least 360,000.

A view of the landslide that destroyed the Munnar College building. Image Credit: I&PRD August 20th

Mumbai alone has a population of 19 million people, but only one university there, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), offers a degree in disaster management and mitigation.

“This is a pressing need,” said Thomas Oommen, associate professor of geological and mining engineering sciences and affiliated associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan Tech. “Technologies used today in disaster management need to be taught to students so they can be ready for when a disaster hits a community this large.”

Oommen was given a grant from the U.S. Consulate General in Mumbai to travel there, along with Tim Frazier from Georgetown University and Himanshu Grover from the University of Washington, to meet with faculty and administration from TISS as well as Indian officials. For two weeks in August, they worked to identify gaps in the TISS program and develop a state-of-the-art disaster management curriculum to be implemented at TISS. They will continue to meet via an online portal every month to continue work on the curriculum, which they hope can then be replicated at universities across India to train more people to handle the disasters to come.

Oommen sees this becoming a way to train professionals already working in the field.

“We want to see if there are shorter programs that can be delivered to people who are already working in this field, like an adult education program or continuing education program, so more people can be trained in this area,” he said.

Bridging new remote sensing research and effective education — built on good communication and getting timely, accurate info to the right people — is a key part of the methodology behind Oommen’s global geohazards work.

Flooding in India’s Idukki district. Image Credit: I&PRD August 20th

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Michigan Technological University (http://www.mtu.edu) is a leading public research university developing new technologies and preparing students to create the future for a prosperous and sustainable world. Michigan Tech offers more than 130 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in engineering; forest resources; computing; technology; business; economics; natural, physical and environmental sciences; arts; humanities; and social sciences.
The College of Sciences and Arts (CSA) fills one of the most important roles on the Michigan Tech campus. We play a part in the education of every student who comes through our doors. We take pride in offering essential foundational courses in the natural sciences and mathematics, as well as the social sciences and humanities—courses that underpin every major on campus. With twelve departments, 28 majors, 30-or-so specializations, and more than 50 minors, CSA has carefully developed programs to suit many interests and skill sets. From sound design and audio technology to actuarial science, applied cognitive science and human factors to rhetoric and technical communication, the college offers many unique programs.

From University of Washington: “USGS awards $10.4M to ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system in the Pacific Northwest “

From University of Washington

August 19, 2019

The U.S. Geological Survey today announced $10.4 million in funding to the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, based at University of Washington, to support the ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system. Some $7.3 million of the funding will go to the UW.

The PNSN is responsible for monitoring earthquakes and volcanoes in Washington and Oregon. It is a partnership between the University of Washington, the University of Oregon and the USGS. The support for the PNSN is among the new ShakeAlert cooperative agreements announced today by the USGS.

The first year’s funding of $5.4 million to the PNSN begins this month. The UW will receive about $3.75 million in direct support of its PNSN activities and $1.66 million will support the PNSN team at the University of Oregon. The second-year funding, of an additional $5 million, is contingent on approval by Congress and will be similarly shared.

Karl Hagel and Pat McChesney, field engineers with the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network team at the University of Washington, install earthquake monitoring equipment on the slopes of Mount St. Helens, with Mount Hood in the distance.Marc Biundo/University of Washington.

“This investment in the PNSN represents a major increase in federal support for earthquake monitoring in the Cascadia region,” said Harold Tobin, director of the PNSN and professor in the UW’s Department of Earth and Space Sciences. “At the end of the two years of funding we anticipate having essentially doubled the number of seismic stations across our whole region that contribute to real-time earthquake early warning. This would allow for full public alerts of any potentially damaging earthquakes, across our entire region of Washington and Oregon, by the end of the two-year period.”

This new award will allow for installation of 104 new seismic stations in Washington state and 44 in Oregon, during the two-year period. It will also support improved, more-sophisticated detection of earthquakes as they begin, and new efforts to engage potential users of the warnings.

ShakeAlert’s network of instruments detect the first, less damaging waves from a major earthquake close to where the earthquake begins. The system then issues alerts for the estimated size and location of the earthquake, providing seconds or minutes of warning before the more damaging ground shaking begins – enough for someone to pull off the road, stop a surgery, or find a safe place to take shelter.

A sample warning, with a countdown of the number of seconds until the strong shaking reaches the user.Pacific Northwest Seismic Network

In the Pacific Northwest’s pilot phase of the system, early adopters in the region have developed pilot projects with guidance and support from the PNSN and USGS, and have received ShakeAlert warning messages for the past two years. These warnings are currently used to trigger loss-reduction measures at critical facilities — such as turning off water valves in public utility districts — before dangerous shaking would arrive.

The additional funding will support the development of new pilot projects in schools, businesses, communities and critical infrastructure facilities in preparation for the eventual goal of open alerts to the general public, as launched recently in the Los Angeles region. The improvements to PNSN’s network supported by this funding will meet the USGS’ recommended station-density standard for public alerting in almost all areas of Washington and Oregon.

“It will enable us to rapidly build out our network to produce faster and more accurate alerts for Cascadia Region earthquakes,” Tobin said.

Existing Pacific Northwest Seismic Network ShakeAlert stations, as of spring 2019. The new funding will roughly double the number of stations in Washington and Oregon.

The funding will also support ongoing research to integrate GPS data into ShakeAlert, which will allow quicker estimates of the magnitude of offshore Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquakes as they unfold. The UW is sharing its research in this area with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA in the hope of improving tsunami-warning capabilities. The UW is working with Central Washington University, also supported by USGS, to receive near-real-time GPS data from across Washington and Oregon that will be integrated into future releases of ShakeAlert.

The regional ShakeAlert effort began in 2011, when the UW joined the University of California, Berkeley and California Institute of Technology as a primary ShakeAlert center in the developing a West Coast warning system. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded $2 million to each university to kick-start ShakeAlert from a research project to an operational system. With support from Congress, the USGS ramped up support for ShakeAlert as the foundation’s seed funding expired.

Additional support for PNSN operations comes from the U.S. Department of Energy and the states Oregon and Washington. The Washington legislature, in its current biennium budget, allocated $1.24 million over two years for additional enhancements to the ShakeAlert network.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Washington is one of the world’s preeminent public universities. Our impact on individuals, on our region, and on the world is profound — whether we are launching young people into a boundless future or confronting the grand challenges of our time through undaunted research and scholarship. Ranked number 10 in the world in Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings and educating more than 54,000 students annually, our students and faculty work together to turn ideas into impact and in the process transform lives and our world. For more about our impact on the world, every day.
So what defines us —the students, faculty and community members at the University of Washington? Above all, it’s our belief in possibility and our unshakable optimism. It’s a connection to others, both near and far. It’s a hunger that pushes us to tackle challenges and pursue progress. It’s the conviction that together we can create a world of good. Join us on the journey.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute via COSMOS: ” Geology creates chemical energy”

From Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

22 August 2019

Origin of a massive methane reservoir discovered.

The manipulator arm of the remotely operated vehicle Jason samples a stream of fluid from a hydrothermal vent.
Chris German/WHOI/NSF, NASA/ROV Jason 2012 / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Scientists know methane is released from deep-sea vents, but its source has long been a mystery.

Now a team from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, US, may have the answer. Analysis of 160 rock samples from across the world’s oceans provides evidence, they say, of the formation and abundance of abiotic methane – methane formed by chemical reactions that don’t involve organic matter.

Nearly every sample contained an assemblage of minerals and gases that form when seawater, moving through the deep oceanic crust, is trapped in magma-hot olivine, a rock-forming mineral, the researchers write in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
.

As the mineral cools, the water trapped inside undergoes a chemical reaction, a process called serpentinisation, which forms hydrogen and methane.

“Here’s a source of chemical energy that’s being created by geology,” says co-author Jeffrey Seewald.

On Earth, deep-sea methane might have played a critical role for the evolution of primitive organisms living at hydrothermal vents on the seafloor, Seewald adds. And elsewhere in the solar system, methane produced through the same process could provide an energy source for basic life forms.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

Vision & Mission

The ocean is a defining feature of our planet and crucial to life on Earth, yet it remains one of the planet’s last unexplored frontiers. For this reason, WHOI scientists and engineers are committed to understanding all facets of the ocean as well as its complex connections with Earth’s atmosphere, land, ice, seafloor, and life—including humanity. This is essential not only to advance knowledge about our planet, but also to ensure society’s long-term welfare and to help guide human stewardship of the environment. WHOI researchers are also dedicated to training future generations of ocean science leaders, to providing unbiased information that informs public policy and decision-making, and to expanding public awareness about the importance of the global ocean and its resources.
Mission Statement

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is dedicated to advancing knowledge of the ocean and its connection with the Earth system through a sustained commitment to excellence in science, engineering, and education, and to the application of this knowledge to problems facing society.

From COSMOS Magazine: “Superdeep diamonds have a story to tell”

16 August 2019
Richard A Lovett

Diamonds from the Juina area of Brazil. Most are superdeep diamonds. Credit Graham Pearson

Tiny imperfections in Brazilian diamonds have revealed a pocket of the Earth’s primordial past, deep in its interior.

In fact, scientists say, these rocks appear to have survived largely undisturbed for 4.5 billion years, making them older than the Moon or anything on the Earth’s surface.

Diamonds form naturally only under high-pressure conditions existing deep beneath the Earth’s crust. That makes them messengers from the mantle, which then rise toward the surface via volcanic conduits, where miners ultimately find them.

Most diamonds form at depths of 150 to 200 kilometres, says Suzette Timmerman, a Dutch geochemist who conducted her research at Australian National University. Diamonds from the Juina area of western Brazil are different, however.

“The Juina area is special because more than 99% of the diamonds form between 410 and 660 kilometres in depth,” she says.

That’s important, because diamonds are notoriously durable.

“Diamonds are the hardest, most indestructible natural substance known,” she says, “so they form a perfect window into the deep Earth.”

Timmerman’s study, published in the journal Science, focused on helium gas trapped in tiny bubbles of fluid in 23 of these diamonds.

Helium comes in two forms: helium-3 and helium-4. The early Solar System had a mix of the two determined by the composition of the interstellar gas cloud from which it formed. But helium-4 continues to be formed as a byproduct of certain types of radioactive decay, particularly the decay of heavy elements such as uranium and thorium.

“If we have a lot of helium-4, it means it must have had quite a bit of time to form,” Timmerman says. “If we find a lot of helium-3, this must be because it’s ancient.”

It’s not quite that simple, of course, because geological processes when the Earth was young tended to move uranium and thorium (and their subsequent production of helium-4) out of the mantle into upper-level rocks.

But when this is corrected for, Timmerman says, the helium isotope ratios in her diamonds prove that the helium trapped within them comes from regions very close in composition to the primordial matter from which the Earth initially formed – mantle rocks that, for whatever reason, never mixed with the rest of the mantle or with material descending from the crust.

“In order to get the compositions we see today,” she says, “it mustn’t have interacted with the rest of the mantle at least since the core and mantle separated” – something that probably occurred in the aftermath of the giant impact that formed the Moon. “It’s definitely a part of the Earth that hasn’t been interacting with the crust, basically since the beginning of time.”

How much of this primordial matter remains is unclear, she says, but one place it apparently does exist is beneath the diamond mines of Brazil. And, she notes, “with this work we are beginning to home in on what is probably the oldest remaining, comparatively undisturbed, material on Earth”.

Other scientists are impressed. “This is an interesting result, with a lot of potential to ‘map out’ elevated helium-3/helium-4 domains in the Erath’s deep interior,” says Matthew Jackson, a geochemist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who was not part of the study team.

It’s also intriguing because it comes only a year before the Japanese space agency hopes to return a sample of even more primordial material from asteroid 162173 Ryugu, and four years before NASA hopes to do the same for asteroid 101955 Bennu.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

From U Cambridge via Eos: “Crystal Clocks Serve as Stopwatch for Magma Storage and Travel Times”

From University of Cambridge

Via

AGU

Eos

8.12.19
Mary Caperton Morton

Magma stored for 1,000 years in an Icelandic volcano journeyed to the surface in just 4 days.

The 2014–2015 eruption of Iceland’s Holuhraun lava field had an eruption style similar to the Borgarhraun eruption of Iceland’s Theistareykir volcano, which took place 10,000 years ago. Credit: Euan J. F. Mutch

Volcanic eruptions are just the tip of the iceberg: Hidden deep below ground, the preeruption behavior and movements of magma remain largely mysterious. Two new studies centered around a volcano in Iceland are shedding light on how long magma was stored deep underground and how long it took to travel to the surface before erupting, information that may be used to improve existing models of complex magmatic systems.

Geophysical monitoring methods can see only so deep beneath the surface of Earth, so to figure out what is happening deep inside a volcano, “you have to be a geological detective,” said Euan Mutch, an igneous petrologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and lead author on both of the new studies, published in Science and Nature Geoscience.

Mutch and colleagues at the University of Cambridge focused on the Borgarhraun eruption of Theistareykir, a volcano in northern Iceland, which took place around 10,000 years ago. Previous studies have shown the magma that fed this eruption came directly from the Mohorovičić discontinuity (the Moho), where Earth’s crust meets its mantle, at a depth of about 24 kilometers—far deeper than geophysical methods can see clearly.

To determine how long the magma was stored at the Moho before erupting, the team used a volcanic mineral called spinel as a crystal stopwatch.

“The elements in the crystal want to be in equilibrium with the surroundings,” Mutch explained.

As the elements equilibrate by diffusing out of the spinel, the mineral’s composition changes, creating a kind of crystal clock. Using known diffusion rates for aluminum and chromium, the team was able to determine how long the minerals were stored in the melt before it erupted, in this case about a thousand years, they wrote in Science.

Mineral maps like this one show areas of concentrated aluminum in yellow and lower concentrations in red and black. The process of diffusion from high to low concentration can be used to estimate how long the crystal remained in the magma chamber before erupting. Credit: Euan J. F. Mutch

In the Nature Geoscience study, Mutch and colleagues used a similar diffusion modeling technique on olivine crystals to show that the magma ascended from the Moho to the surface in as little as 4 days, at a rate of 0.02 to 0.1 meter per second.

The two studies represent some of the first evidence of magmatic timescales for eruptions originating in the deep crust at the Moho boundary, said David Neave, a petrologist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom who was not involved in either of the new studies.

“A lot of progress has been made understanding timescales of shallower volcanoes, but these are the first studies to estimate how long magma is stored in the deep crust before it erupts,” Neave said. “That’s crucial new information.”

Diffusion modeling is not a new technique. The methods have been around for at least 10 years, Neave said, but Mutch and colleagues “were very clever in working out the uncertainties and arrived at much more precise estimates for these timescales than previous groups have been able to do.”

The findings also lend support to a growing body of research suggesting that magmatic systems can be much more complex than the textbook model of a volcano fed directly from a single bulbous magma chamber, said Stephen Sparks, a volcanologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom who was not involved in either of the new studies.

“Their results contribute to the evidence that supports vertically extensive transcrustal magma systems,” Sparks said. The study does not introduce any fundamentally new concepts but “supports this emerging new paradigm. The paper is amongst the most thorough and convincing published so far.”

Applying the Techniques to Other Volcanoes

Whether the 1,000-year timescales for magma storage and mere days of travel to the surface are typical of other volcanoes or unique to Theistareykir is unknown, Mutch said. The next steps will be to apply the same diffusion modeling techniques to other eruptions.

Crystal clocks can be used at a variety of volcano types, not just the basaltic volcanoes found in Iceland, Neave said.

“Most volcanoes are ultimately underlain by basaltic materials, even if they’re erupting rhyolite or andesite at the surface like at the Cascades volcanoes [in the United States],” he said. “I think this approach will prove to be widely applicable to a range of volcanic settings.”

The findings may ultimately aid in developing more accurate magmatic and eruption models as well as improving volcanic hazard forecasts, Mutch said. The Nature Geoscience paper in particular showed a link between the magma’s rate of ascent and the release of carbon dioxide, which could be used to predict an impending eruption.

“At the ascent rates estimated for the Borgarhraun magma, an increase in carbon dioxide flux at the surface would only be detected at most 2 days before the eruption,” Mutch said. However, other volcanic systems may offer more lead time: “This threshold will be different for magmas with different carbon contents and that are stored at different depths before eruption.”

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Eos is the leading source for trustworthy news and perspectives about the Earth and space sciences and their impact. Its namesake is Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, who represents the light shed on understanding our planet and its environment in space by the Earth and space sciences.

The University of Cambridge (abbreviated as Cantab in post-nominal letters) is a collegiate public research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, Cambridge is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world’s fourth-oldest surviving university. It grew out of an association of scholars who left the University of Oxford after a dispute with townsfolk. The two ancient universities share many common features and are often jointly referred to as “Oxbridge”.

Cambridge is formed from a variety of institutions which include 31 constituent colleges and over 100 academic departments organised into six schools. The university occupies buildings throughout the town, many of which are of historical importance. The colleges are self-governing institutions founded as integral parts of the university. In the year ended 31 July 2014, the university had a total income of £1.51 billion, of which £371 million was from research grants and contracts. The central university and colleges have a combined endowment of around £4.9 billion, the largest of any university outside the United States. Cambridge is a member of many associations and forms part of the “golden triangle” of leading English universities and Cambridge University Health Partners, an academic health science centre. The university is closely linked with the development of the high-tech business cluster known as “Silicon Fen”.

From Curtin University: “Curtin research helps solve mystery of when plate tectonics emerged”

From Curtin University

8 August 2019

Lucien Wilkinson
Media Consultant
Supporting Humanities and Science and Engineering
Tel: +61 8 9266 9185
Mob: +61 401 103 683
lucien.wilkinson@curtin.edu.au

Yasmine Phillips
Media Relations Manager, Public Relations
Tel: +61 8 9266 9085
Mob: +61 401 103 877
yasmine.phillips@curtin.edu.au

New Curtin University research into how Earth’s rocks formed billions of years ago has helped unlock the mystery of how the planet’s unique plate tectonic behaviour changed over its more than four billion-year lifetime.

In the article. No image credit.

The tectonic plates of the world were mapped in 1996, USGS.

The research, published in Nature today, found that by comparing the temperature, pressure and age of ancient rocks, it was revealed that plate tectonics evolved gradually over the past 2.5 billion years as our planet slowly cooled.

Lead Australian researcher Dr Tim Johnson, from the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University, said the new research helped settle the ongoing debate of when and how earth’s plate tectonics system began.

“Metamorphic rocks are those that transform as they are buried and heated when tectonic plates grind together. Not only are they exceptionally beautiful, they may also hold the key to unlocking the mystery of how Earth’s unique plate tectonic behaviour changed throughout time,” Dr Johnson said.

“Some geologists consider that Earth has had plate tectonics throughout its four-and-a-half billion-year existence, whereas others consider that plate tectonics appeared abruptly some one billion years ago.

“Using a simple statistical analysis of the temperature, pressure and age of metamorphic rocks, we have revealed that plate tectonics evolved gradually over the past 2.5 billion years as our planet slowly cooled.”

Dr Johnson said a large focus of the research was on how Earth’s tectonic processes might have changed through the Proterozoic Eon, 2.5 billion to 0.54 billion years ago, which represents nearly half of Earth’s history.

“There is debate as to whether the plate tectonic processes we observe today can be used to interpret really ancient rocks or if Earth’s tectonic processes were fundamentally different in the deep geological past,” Dr Johnson said.

“Understanding how the ancient Earth was different to the modern Earth is key to accurately interpreting how Earth’s rocks formed and why they are distributed across the continents in the patterns that we see, including where mineral resources occur, how extensive they might be, and where additional resources might be found.”

The research paper was co-authored by Dr Robert Holder and Professor Daniel Viete of Johns Hopkins University and Professor Michael Brown from the University of Maryland.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Curtin University (formerly known as Curtin University of Technology and Western Australian Institute of Technology) is an Australian public research university based in Bentley and Perth, Western Australia. The university is named after the 14th Prime Minister of Australia, John Curtin, and is the largest university in Western Australia, with over 58,000 students (as of 2016).

Curtin was conferred university status after legislation was passed by the Parliament of Western Australia in 1986. Since then, the university has been expanding its presence and has campuses in Singapore, Malaysia, Dubai and Mauritius. It has ties with 90 exchange universities in 20 countries. The University comprises five main faculties with over 95 specialists centres. The University formerly had a Sydney campus between 2005 & 2016. On 17 September 2015, Curtin University Council made a decision to close its Sydney campus by early 2017.

Curtin University is a member of Australian Technology Network (ATN), and is active in research in a range of academic and practical fields, including Resources and Energy (e.g., petroleum gas), Information and Communication, Health, Ageing and Well-being (Public Health), Communities and Changing Environments, Growth and Prosperity and Creative Writing.

It is the only Western Australian university to produce a PhD recipient of the AINSE gold medal, which is the highest recognition for PhD-level research excellence in Australia and New Zealand.

Curtin has become active in research and partnerships overseas, particularly in mainland China. It is involved in a number of business, management, and research projects, particularly in supercomputing, where the university participates in a tri-continental array with nodes in Perth, Beijing, and Edinburgh. Western Australia has become an important exporter of minerals, petroleum and natural gas. The Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited the Woodside-funded hydrocarbon research facility during his visit to Australia in 2005.

From Carnegie Institution for Science: “Geoengineering versus a volcano”

From Carnegie Institution for Science

August 05, 2019

A photo of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo by Jackson K., courtesy of USGS.

Major volcanic eruptions spew ash particles into the atmosphere, which reflect some of the Sun’s radiation back into space and cool the planet. But could this effect be intentionally recreated to fight climate change? A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters investigates.

Solar geoengineering is a theoretical approach to curbing the effects of climate change by seeding the atmosphere with a regularly replenished layer of intentionally released aerosol particles. Proponents sometimes describe it as being like a “human-made” volcano.

“Nobody likes the idea of intentionally tinkering with our climate system at global scale,” said Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira. “Even if we hope these approaches won’t ever have to be used, it is really important that we understand them because someday they might be needed to help alleviate suffering.”

He, along with Carnegie’s Lei Duan (a former student from Zhejiang University), Long Cao of Zhejiang University, and Govindasamy Bala of the Indian Institute of Science, set out to compare the effects on the climate of a volcanic eruption and of solar geoengineering. They used sophisticated models to investigate the impact of a single volcano-like event, which releases particulates that linger in the atmosphere for just a few years, and of a long-term geoengineering deployment, which requires maintaining an aerosol layer in the atmosphere.

They found that regardless of how it got there, when the particulate material is injected into the atmosphere, there is a rapid decrease in surface temperature, with the land cooling faster than the ocean.

However, the volcanic eruption created a greater temperature difference between the land and sea than did the geoengineering simulation. This resulted in different precipitation patterns between the two scenarios. In both situations, precipitation decreases over land—meaning less available water for many people living there—but the decrease was more significant in the aftermath of a volcanic eruption than it was in the geoengineering case.

“When a volcano goes off, the land cools substantially quicker than the ocean. This disrupts rainfall patterns in ways that you wouldn’t expect to happen with a sustained deployment of a geoengineering system,” said lead author Duan.

Overall, the authors say that their results demonstrate that volcanic eruptions are imperfect analogs for geoengineering and that scientists should be cautious about extrapolating too much from them.

“While it’s important to evaluate geoengineering proposals from an informed position, the best way to reduce climate risk is to reduce emissions,” Caldeira concluded.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Carnegie Institution for Science

Andrew Carnegie established a unique organization dedicated to scientific discovery “to encourage, in the broadest and most liberal manner, investigation, research, and discovery and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind…” The philosophy was and is to devote the institution’s resources to “exceptional” individuals so that they can explore the most intriguing scientific questions in an atmosphere of complete freedom. Carnegie and his trustees realized that flexibility and freedom were essential to the institution’s success and that tradition is the foundation of the institution today as it supports research in the Earth, space, and life sciences.

6.5 meter Magellan Telescopes located at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory, Chile

Carnegie Las Campanas 2.5 meter Irénée Dupont telescope, Atacama Desert, over 2,500 m (8,200 ft) high approximately 100 kilometres (62 mi) northeast of the city of La Serena,Chile

Carnegie Institution Swope telescope at Las Campanas, Chile, 100 kilometres (62 mi) northeast of the city of La Serena. near the north end of a 7 km (4.3 mi) long mountain ridge. Cerro Las Campanas, near the southern end and over 2,500 m (8,200 ft) high, at Las Campanas, Chile

[/caption]