Geobulletin alpha

Indian traffic – Hyderabad Metro railway project and construction 

Most of us know, travelling on the roads of Germany can’t be compared to travelling Indian roads! While it is easy to travel longer distances by road and really getting from destination A to B, despite some hundred kilometres distance …Read more

Living with volcanoes, and learning from the past. 

November 13th, 1985, is a date that is still etched in my memory. This was the day that the Colombian town of Armero was submerged beneath a catastrophic flood of volcanic rocks, mud and water; a lahar that had swept down from the summit of the volcano Nevado del Ruiz, erupting about 40 kilometres away. For days, terrible scenes of anguish and despair filled our television screens, as rescuers struggled desperately to help the survivors, and recover the many thousands of victims. Thirty [...]

Last Toronto Glacier Fading - Victim of Global Warming 

Here it is, only almost May, and the last ice is fading.  I took this sad shot today.  We know that some day we'll have kilometres of ice, and we'll all live underground.  Constantly redoing the ice shafts as the glaciers grind over us.  But not this day. Here is a picture of an Arctic wildflower in Toronto, struggling against the coming heat.  Oh, I know you're going to ask why all

Humble neutron is valuable tool in geology 

With the ability to analyse the properties of the Earth’s internal components to the atomic scale in conditions only found kilometres below our feet, recent studies have allowed geoscientists to study our planets internal working, as well as those of worlds further afield, at new fundamental levels. And all from the relative comfort of the […] The post Humble neutron is valuable tool in geology appeared first on Liberty, Equality, and

Forest fire tracking with Landsat-8 

On July 31st a forest fire broke out in the Swedish county of Västmanland. The fire was quite large by Swedish standards covering an area described as 10 x 15 kilometres. There is, to date, one confirmed death. The fire required a intensive response by the emergency services. It is located close to villages and towns and could not be allowed to spread out of control. Firefighters from the Stockholm region were deployed to assist local firefighters, the army reserve was deployed and 10 [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Spectacular splatter – the marvels of a mud volcano 

Mud volcanoes, unlike many others, do not extrude lava. Instead, they release glutinous bubbling brown slurry of mineral-rich water and sediment. They range in size from several kilometres across, to less than a metre – the little ones are known as mud pots, reflecting their diminutive nature. The world’s largest, though, is Lusi: a mud volcano

Drilling into New Zealand's most dangerous fault 

The Alpine Fault forms the plate boundary in New Zealand's South Island, and is a very significant fault on a global scale. It last ruptured in 1717 AD and appears to produce large earthquakes on average every 330 years. Its next rupture has a high probability (28%)  of occurring in the next 50 years.Each time the Alpine Fault ruptures, there is roughly 8 metres of sideways movement and about 1 to 2 metres of vertical uplift on the eastern side. These magnitude 8 (M8) earthquakes can [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Long-lived lakes have a lot to tell 

The world’s oldest, deepest freshwater lake lies in southeast Siberia: Lake Baikal. Stretching some 600 kilometres across the Russian landscape, Baikal marks what the very early stages of a new ocean – an ancient rift that cleaved the centre of Asia apart throughout the Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic. Today, there are still signs of tectonic activity

Huge Trench Discovered Beneath Antarctic Ice 

Researchers have discovered a feature larger than the Grand Canyon beneath the ice of Antarctica. They describe it as: “a massive subglacial valley up to 3 kilometres deep, more than 300 kilometres long and up to 25 kilometres across. In places, the floor of this valley is more than 2000 metres below sea level.” Quoted

The Dart Landslide 

Simon Cox   GNS ScienceM. McSaveney GNS ScienceSlip Stream is a tributary to the Dart River in the South Island of New Zealand. There has been an active landslide here for several thousand years, periodically sending down lobes of debris to gradually build up a large fan in the Dart Valley. There was vegetation established right across the fan, but over the last few years the widespread cover of trees has been largely buried and killed off by a very active phase of erosion and deposition. [...]

Fieldwork in photos 

We're in Valdivia at the moment, which means reliable internet, something that we've been without for the last week. We've been at Pucatrihue and Llico, coring marshes in our search for evidence of predecessors of the 1960 Chilean earthquake. Here's a quick photo roundup. The marshes at Pucatrihue are extensive. We've taken transects of cores to investigate the sediments they contain. Contrary to popular belief, we're not just here to work on our tans. Here's Emma in full [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Moulding Malaspina’s moraines 

There are many different types of glaciers, each defined by where they’re located and how they terminate. Piedmont glaciers are those that flow out from a confining valley and spill out into the open, forming wide lobes. This one is Malaspina Glacier, which spreads out over the Seward Ice Field. Stretching 45 kilometres over the

Imaggeo on Mondays: That spot there? It’s 143,000 kilometres across 

This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays highlights an amazing view of the night sky at new moon. Christian Klepp took this photo while at Waterton Glacier in the Rocky Mountains – it’s an amazing feat of determination to spend the night beside a glacial lake in the Rockies, let alone to capture such a photo! The

Giant Water Channels Found Beneath Antarctic Ice 

Scientists have discovered huge ice channels beneath a floating ice shelf in Antarctica. At 250 metres high, the channels are almost as tall as the Eiffel tower and stretch hundreds of kilometres along the ice shelf. The channels are likely to influence the stability of the ice shelf and their discovery will help researchers understand how the ice will respond to changing

Warming Ocean Moves Marine Life Poleward 

“The leading edge or ‘front line’ of a marine species’ distribution is moving towards the poles at the average rate of 72 kilometres per decade, which is considerably faster than terrestrial species.” Quoted from the CSIRO press

Two flightless Kiwi 

Two flightless Kiwi, Chris Moy from Otago University and I, will be following the bar-tailed godwit (kuaka), one of New Zealand’s native birds to Alaska at the end of May.   While we must fly in a plane for over 12 hours, the godwit that is best known for being able to fly 12,000 kilometres in eight days will complete the journey unaided. read

White Island Gas Flight 

Today I joined Karen Britten on  a GeoNet gas monitoring flight over White Island. This was to check the flux of volcanic gas emissions following an ash eruption a few days ago.The plane is modified to allow the equipment to extend outside so that the measurements can be made. Carbon Dioxide, Hydrogen Sulphide and Sulphur Dioxide are the most common volcanic gases and are all measured during a gas flight.Approaching White Island, we could see the plume extending first vertically, then off [...]

Ngauruhoe's Far Side 

Climbing Ngauruhoe from the South is well off the tourist route, and involves scrambling up unstable blocks of lava for about 700 vertical metres up the face of the cone.I chose to go up more or less up the centre of the view you can see here, and it took me about an hour and a half of steady plodding to the to. The crater of Ngauruhoe was last erupting in from 1973 to 1975, during which time it occasionally threw out blocks of lava to a distance of about 3 kilometres. If you click on the image [...]

A few less common words (part 2) 

Following on from part 1, here's the rest of the explanation of the common word summary of our work. We were delayed posting this by a wild goose chase to find a highly inaccessible site...When the shaking happens the land can go up and down. Some places change from being high up before the shaking to being lower down after. Other places change from low down to higher up. We're describing the vertical component of coseismic deformation resulting from a subduction zone earthquake. This is [...]

Huge cracks on the Moon 

Ebb and Flow, the twin spacecraft that comprise NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, have created a gravity map and other analyses of the moon, and it seems that it is riven by deep cracks. The gravity map reveals an abundance of features never before seen in detail, such as tectonic structures, volcanic landforms, basin rings, crater central peaks and numerous simple, bowl-shaped craters. The map also reveals evidence for fracturing of the interior extending [...]