"Even if all of the proposed mines become operational, the U.S. does not have enough lithium to meet national demand, regardless of all of the variables that we considered in our analysis," s

The open access article: Future water constraints on United States lithium mining under climate change

The research, led by scientists at [...] Pusan National University in South Korea, offers fresh insight into how massive ice sheets react to long term climate changes and what that could mean for future sea level rise.

The study highlights that ice sheets may not always respond to climate change in a slow, predictable way. Instead, they can suddenly shift into a much more sensitive state after crossing critical climate thresholds.

Across the globe, mid-ocean ridges have a nondramatic style — nothing like Washington State’s explosive Mount St. Helens or southern Italy’s Mount Vesuvius, the destroyer of Pompeii and Herculaneum. So the team aboard the Meteor wasn’t expecting anything unusual when they passed over a submerged segment of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge called the Reykjanes Ridge. They just wanted to confirm that their equipment was in working order.

The crew switched the equipment on, pinging back X-ray-like images that revealed layers of the seafloor’s stone interior. “We decided to do two test profiles over the Reykjanes Ridge because it was logistically easy and potentially interesting,” said Preine, now a marine geophysicist at the National Oceanography Center in England.

Seismic images of mid-ocean ridges typically show rough and jagged terrain, formed when lava oozes up into the cold ocean along faults or fissures and hardens suddenly into stone. But that’s not what Preine saw. Along the ridge were smooth mounds with steep sides and flat tops, their flanks draped in scattered deposits that looked like debris from an eruption above the sea surface. The formations reminded him of the topic of his doctoral dissertation, a submerged system of notoriously explosive volcanoes near Santorini, Greece.

An exclusive investigation based on documents leaked to the Guardian and the ABC’s Four Corners can reveal that BHP, one of Australia’s biggest historic emitters, has dumped plans for a facility that could have significantly reduced emissions and has put on ice renewable projects designed to power its iron ore operations in the vast, resource-rich Pilbara region.

Like salsa verde on your favorite burrito, a green aurora slathers up the sky in this 2017 June 25 snapshot from the International Space Station. About 400 kilometers (250 miles) above Earth, the orbiting station is itself within the upper realm of the auroral displays. Aurorae have the signature colors of excited molecules and atoms at the low densities found at extreme altitudes. Emission from atomic oxygen dominates this view. The tantalizing glow is green at lower altitudes, but rarer reddish bands extend above the space station's horizon. The orbital scene was captured while passing over a point south and east of Australia, with stars above the horizon at the right belonging to the constellation Canis Major, Orion's big dog. Sirius, alpha star of Canis Major, is the brightest star near the Earth's limb.

Source

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/46766835

Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock formed from mud that is a mix of flakes of clay minerals and silt-sized particles of other minerals, especially quartz and calcite. It is characterized by fissility, the tendency to split into thin layers less than 1 centimetre (0.39 in) in thickness, and is the most common sedimentary rock.

Photographer: Chris Woodrich

CC BY-SA 4.0

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/59982945

Bedretto (Switzerland) (AFP) – Researchers have made the ground shake in southern Switzerland, triggering thousands of tiny earthquakes in a monitored setting, as they seek to discover seismicity insights that could reduce risks.

"It was a success!" said Domenico Giardini, one of the lead researchers on the project, as he inspected a crack in the rock wall lining a narrow tunnel far below the Swiss Alps.

Wearing a fluorescent orange jumpsuit and helmet, the geology professor at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) switched on his headlight to get a better look.

"We had seismicity," he said excitedly, explaining that the goal was "to understand what happens at depth when the Earth moves".

Giardini was standing in the BedrettoLab carved out in the middle of a narrow 5.2-kilometre (3.2-mile) ventilation tunnel leading to the Furka railway tunnel.

Reached by specially adapted electric vehicles that slide through the dank darkness along concrete slabs laid over a muddy dirt floor, the deep underground laboratory is the ideal location to create and study earthquakes, Giardini said.

"It is perfect, because we have a kilometre and a half of mountain on top of us... and we can look very close at the faults, how they move, when they move, and we can make them move ourselves," he told AFP.

Typically, researchers seeking to study earthquakes place sensors near known faults and wait.

In the BedrettoLab, by contrast, researchers filled a pre-selected fault with sensors and other instruments, and then sought to trigger movement.

For the experiment, dubbed Fault Activation and Earthquake Rupture (FEAR-2), dozens of scientists from across Europe spent four days in late April injecting 750 cubic metres of water into boreholes drilled into the tunnel's rock walls, aiming to provoke a magnitude-1 earthquake.

"We don't create a new fault... We only facilitate that it moves," Giardini said.

During the experiment, no people were in the tunnel for safety reasons, with everything managed remotely from the ETH Zurich lab in northern Switzerland.

When AFP visited the Zurich lab a day into the experiment, scientists were excitedly discussing the first signs of seismicity on the monitors.

"This is kind of pushing the frontier of science," said Ryan Schultz, a seismologist specialised in man-made earthquakes.

The excitement was interrupted by a sudden power cut in the tunnel that sent the scientists in Zurich scrambling for answers.

"We have our earthquake machine... Now we have to play with the parameters," said Frederic Massin, a French seismologist and technical expert, as he studied his screen for clues to what had caused the outage.

The glitch was short-lived and pumping soon resumed.

In the end, some 8,000 small seismic events were induced along the targeted fault, but also, surprisingly, along other faults running perpendicular to the main one, sparking local magnitudes ranging from -5 to -0.14.

"We did not reach the target magnitude that we had set, but we reached just below," Giardini said.

That alone was a huge success, he insisted, pointing out that although there had been previous efforts to create tiny earthquakes in lab settings, it was "never at this scale and never this deep".

"It's simply never been tried."

The findings, he said, would help determine the best injection angles for reaching magnitude 1 at the BedrettoLab when researchers next give it a try in June.

Magnitudes on the Richter scale are measured logarithmically, with each whole number increase representing ten times more in measured amplitude.

Magnitudes below zero are still palpable. Anyone standing near the fault during the largest triggered quakes, at -0.14, would have felt an acceleration of "1.5 G", or 1.5 times the standard acceleration due to gravity, Giardini said.

They would have flown "in the air with a big jump", he explained.

Nothing was felt at the surface, and Giardini stressed that by lubricating an existing fault, the team was adding only "about one percent of what is the natural risk".

The experiment, he insisted, was completely "safe".

Giardini explained the importance of the research, stressing: "If we master how to produce quakes of a certain size, then we know how not to produce them."

This was particularly important in connection with underground activities like excavation and extraction, he said, pointing for instance to quakes triggered by disposal of wastewater from the fracking industry in Texas.

He also highlighted South Korea's 5.4-magnitude Pohang quake in November 2017, triggered by water injections at the country's first experimental geothermal power plant.

"Without realising it, they started injecting and initiating induced seismicity on a large fault, (creating) a very serious quake," Giardini pointed out.

"We're not saying we should not go underground," he insisted.

"We need to learn how to do it more safely."