News by Subject Earth Science

Big earthquakes appear to follow a brief episode of 'shallow mantle creep' and 'seismic swarms,' suggests new research that offers an explanation for the foreshocks observed prior to large temblors.

A closer look at small earthquakes that took place at the Oroville Dam in California's Sierra Nevada foothills in February 2017 -- near the time when the dam's spillway failed -- suggest that the seismic activity was related to reservoir discharge that opened and closed fractures in the rock below the spillway.

Machine-learning research published in two related papers today in Nature Geosciences reports the detection of seismic signals accurately predicting the Cascadia fault's slow slippage, a type of failure observed to precede large earthquakes in other subduction zones.

Researchers argue in a new study that a paradigm shift is needed for assessing bridges' tsunami risk.

In the search for life on other planets, scientists traditionally have looked for a world with water. But an Ohio State geophysicist wonders if we should look to rocks instead.

Using data gleaned from historical reports, researchers have now identified the sources of some of the most destructive Indonesian earthquakes in Java, Bali and Nusa Tenggara, using these data to independently test how well Indonesia's 2010 and 2017 seismic hazard assessments perform in predicting damaging ground motion.