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Earthquake prediction has a long record of not working. Decades of hunting for a reliable precursor, a swarm of small shocks, a change in groundwater, a shift in the ground's electrical properties,…
A seismometer reports one number for one patch of ground. The house a kilometer down the road has no seismometer of its own, so whatever shook it has to be inferred from the instrument that does…
Somewhere off northern Israel, under a few hundred meters of water, the seabed has a step in it roughly 30 meters high. By rights, it should be gone. Sediment carried up from the Nile settles along…
Over roughly 34 hours in July 2019, the desert northeast of the town of Ridgecrest, California, tore open twice. A magnitude 6.4 shock struck on the Fourth of July; the next evening a magnitude 7.1…
Balance a boulder on a narrow pedestal and leave it alone for ten thousand years, and it becomes a strange kind of instrument. Every big earthquake that shook the ground beneath it was a test the…
Stand at the edge of a fresh earthquake rupture, and the ground tells you exactly what happened. Cracks fan across the desert floor. The surface is offset, sometimes by metres, along a ragged seam…
Give the same aerial imagery to two dozen geologists, ask them all to trace the active faults, and you might expect the answers to converge, especially the ones from decades-hardened professionals.…
The plan for the Norwegian North Sea is to take carbon dioxide captured from industry, pipe it out under the seabed, and leave it there for good. Several storage licenses have already been awarded on…
On 23 November 1980, an earthquake struck the Irpinia district of southern Italy and did not stop at one fault. The rupture broke three fault segments in sequence, reaching magnitude 6.9 and killing…
Every step you take sends a small pulse of energy into the ground. It is far too weak to feel, and normally far too weak to bother with. But run a fibre-optic cable along the street and watch it…
A jet crossing the sound barrier does not gently speed up past its own noise. It compresses the pressure waves it is making into a single sharp front, and the boom arrives all at once. Some…
No seismometer has ever recorded a great earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The fault runs offshore from northern California to British Columbia, and the last time it broke along most of its…