image: Map of the eastern Indian Ocean and surrounding regions. Location of the drilling expedition and the Sunda subduction zone also shown. The Indo-Australian plate subducts beneath the Eurasian plate at the subduction zone and it was the source of the 2004 earthquake and tsunami offshore Sumatra to Andaman Islands (rupture area shaded in yellow). Ocean drilling boreholes are red dots (U1480, U1481). The Bengal and Nicobar submarine fans are fed by river sediments eroded from the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau, creating very large thicknesses of sediment. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the May 26, 2017, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by A. Hüpers at University of Bremen in Bremen, Germany, and colleagues was titled, "Release of mineral-bound water prior to subduction tied to shallow seismogenic slip off Sumatra." view more
Credit: Lisa McNeill, University of Southampton