Landslides are a perennial threat in California, where the geology and steep topography mean the land is more prone to slipping than in other places. Now, researchers at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics and UC Santa Cruz studying two large Northern California landslides think they’ve found the key to predicting landslide motion hidden… Continue Reading ‘Giant Lab Experiment’ Leads to New Model for Predicting Landslides
Are Deep Fluids Behind the Largest Earthquakes? ‘Not So Fast!’ Says UT Graduate Student
Sandwiched between tectonic plates are layers of material that show up as thin shadows on seismic tomography, a kind of CT scan of the Earth. For years, scientists assumed the anomalies were signs of highly pressurized water squeezed into densely packed rock and that the fluid acted as a kind of hair-trigger on earthquake faults.… Continue Reading Are Deep Fluids Behind the Largest Earthquakes? ‘Not So Fast!’ Says UT Graduate Student