News by Subject Earth Science

A new species of feathered dinosaur has been discovered in China, and described by American and Chinese authors in The Anatomical Record. The one-of-a-kind specimen preserves feathers and bones that provide new information about how dinosaurs grew and how they differed from birds.

Japanese researchers used a Global Navigation Satellite System-Acoustic ranging combination technique to detect signals due to slow slip events in the Nankai Trough with seafloor deformations of 5 cm or more and durations on the order of one year. These events generally occurred on the shallow sides of regions with strong interplate coupling and represent variations in interplate friction conditions, which may help simulate the occurrence of megathrust earthquakes originating from this subduction zone and contribute earthquake disaster prevention.

The magnitude of the Great Lisbon Earthquake event, a historic and devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Portugal on All Saints' Day in 1755, may not be as high as previously estimated.

A new submarine volcano was formed off the island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean in 2018. This was shown by an oceanographic campaign in May 2019. Now an international team led by the scientist Simone Cesca from the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ has illuminated the processes deep inside the Earth before and during the formation of the new volcano. The study was published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

A fiber optic network in the North Sea was used to record seismicity.

New research strongly suggests that the distinct 'oxygenation events' that created Earth's breathable atmosphere happened spontaneously, rather than being a consequence of biological or tectonic revolutions. The study not only shines a light on the history of oxygen on our planet, it gives new insight into the prevalence of oxygenated worlds other than our own.

Since August a large accumulation of pumice has been drifting in the Southwest Pacific towards Australia. Researchers at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, together with colleagues from Canada and Australia, have now identified the origin of this pumice raft. It is a so far nameless underwater volcano in Tongan waters. The study has been published online in the international Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research.