Surface mapping technology such as GPS, radar and laser scanning have long been used to measure features on the Earth’s surface. Now, a new computational technique developed at The University of Texas at Austin is allowing scientists to use those technologies to look inside the planet. (more…)
A JPL Scientist Reflects on L.A.’s Last Big Quake
Twenty years ago this week, in the predawn darkness of Jan. 17, 1994, at five seconds before 4:31 a.m. PST, the ground ruptured violently on a blind thrust fault (a crack in Earth’s crust that does not reach the surface) about 11 miles (18 kilometers) beneath Reseda, in California’s San Fernando Valley about 20 miles (31 kilometers) northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The resulting magnitude 6.7 earthquake, known as the Northridge earthquake, became the first large quake to strike directly under an urban area in the United States since the 1933 magnitude 6.4 earthquake in Long Beach, Calif. (more…)
A new analysis of data from NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) shows that molten rock may have been present on the Moon more recently and for longer periods than previously thought. Differentiation — a settling out of rock layers as liquid rock cools — would require thousands of years and a fluid rock sea at least six miles deep.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Early in the Moon’s history an ocean of molten rock covered its entire surface. As that lunar magma ocean cooled over millions of years, it differentiated to form the Moon’s crust and mantle. But according to a new analysis by planetary scientists from Brown University, this wasn’t the last time the Moon’s surface was melted on a massive scale. (more…)
Study simulating pressures in mantle beneath the ocean floor shows that rocks can melt at depths up to 250 kilometers
Magma forms far deeper than geologists previously thought, according to new research results.
A team led by geologist Rajdeep Dasgupta of Rice University put very small samples of peridotite, rock derived from Earth’s mantle, under high pressures in a laboratory.
The scientists found that the rock can and does liquify, at least in small amounts, at pressures equivalent to those found as deep as 250 kilometers down in the mantle beneath the ocean floor. (more…)
Global warming villain CO2 may have a surprisingly green future
The next frontier in the search for renewable energy lies less than two miles from where you are now.
Unless you’re reading this on the International Space Station.
Geothermal heat a mile or two deep in Earth’s crust is a potential source of energy that could be tapped by an unlikely carrier: carbon dioxide (CO2), the central villain in global warming. That energy, unlike solar and wind, could be easily turned on and off without the intermediate step of being stored in a battery. And it would be constant and reliable. (more…)
The Earth is constantly manufacturing new crust, spewing molten magma up along undersea ridges at the boundaries of tectonic plates. The process is critical to the planet’s metabolism, including the cycle of underwater life and the delicate balance of carbon in the ocean and atmosphere.
Now, scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have observed ocean crust forming in an entirely unexpected way—one that may influence those cycles of life and carbon and, in turn, affect the much-discussed future of the world’s climate.
Working at the Guaymas basin in the Gulf of California, WHOI scientists confirmed what they suspected from brief glimpses of the area during previous missions: The inner Earth is injecting swaths of magma called sills as far as 50 kilometers away from the plate boundary, on each side of the ridge —nearly 10 times farther from such an active ocean ridge than had been observed before. (more…)
