A first-of-its-kind video showing the ground cracking during a major earthquake is even more remarkable than previously thought. It not only captures a ground motion never caught on video before but also shows the crack curving as it moves.

This curvy movement has been inferred from the geological record and from "slickenlines" — scrape marks on the sides of faults — but it had never been seen in action, geophysicist Jesse Kearse, a postdoctoral researcher currently at Kyoto University in Japan, said in a statement.

"Instead of things moving straight across the video screen, they moved along a curved path that has a convexity downwards, which instantly started bells ringing in my head," Kearse said, "because some of my previous research has been specifically on curvature of fault slip, but from the geological record."

Scientists have discovered a long-lost landscape that's been preserved beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet for 30 million years.

Erosion by ancient rivers appears to have carved large, flat surfaces beneath the ice in East Antarctica between 80 million and 34 million years ago. Understanding how these features formed, and how they continue to affect the landscape, could help refine predictions of future ice loss, researchers reported July 11 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

"We've long been intrigued and puzzled about fragments of evidence for 'flat' landscapes beneath the Antarctic ice sheets," study co-author Neil Ross, a geophysicist at Newcastle University in the U.K., said in a statement. "This study brings the jigsaw pieces of data together, to reveal the big picture: how these ancient surfaces formed, their role in determining the present-day flow of the ice, and their possible influence on how the East Antarctic Ice Sheet will evolve in a warming world."

The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season officially began on June 1, yet we've seen remarkably little activity compared to the hyperactive seasons of recent years. By this point in 2024, we had already tracked five named storms, including two hurricanes. This year, three named storms, Andrea, Barry and Chantal, have reached tropical storm strength. Only Chantal had impact on the U.S. mainland, causing minor coastal flooding and brief power outages along parts of the Southeast coast. So, despite record global sea surface temperatures, why have storms failed to form?

Ever been late because you misread a clock? Sometimes, the “clocks” geologists use to date events can also be misread. Unravelling Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history with rocks is tricky business. < <Case in point: the discovery of an ancient meteorite impact crater was recently reported in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia. The original study, by a different group, made headlines with the claim the crater formed 3.5 billion years ago. If true, it would be Earth’s oldest by far.

As it turns out, we’d also been investigating the same site. Our results are published in Science Advances today. While we agree that this is the site of an ancient meteorit

A newly mapped 7 km (4.3 miles) segment of the Concord Fault, now identified as the Madigan Avenue strand, has been confirmed as actively creeping beneath residential neighborhoods in Concord and Walnut Creek, California.

The Concord Fault is a major branch of the Pacific–North America plate boundary system in Northern California, linking the Bartlett Springs–Green Valley Faults in the north with the Greenville and Calaveras Faults to the south. Like many faults in the Bay Area, it releases some of its long-term motion through slow, steady creep rather than sudden earthquakes.

The newly defined trace, located 170–500 m (558–1 640 feet) west of previously mapped fault lines, represents a major shift in how seismic hazard is understood in the area.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24626684

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Anastassia Makarieva has also written more on this topic.

For information on syntropic practices for building up a forest ecosystem, see the helpful resources here.

Veganic permaculture food forests using syntropic methods can provide individual and community food security and sovereignty while simultaneously restoring landscapes and sparing the remaining forest from animal agriculture.

In the Amazon especially, some people are already reforesting with fruit trees and other beneficial vegetation, and they invite others to join in the effort.

The construction of thousands of dams since 1835 has caused Earth's poles to wobble, new research suggests.

Scientists found that large dams hold so much water they redistribute mass around the globe, shifting the position of Earth's crust relative to the mantle, the planet's middle layer.

Earth's mantle is gooey, and the crust forms a solid shell that can slide around on top of it. Weight on the crust that causes it to shift relative to the mantle also shifts the location of Earth's poles, the researchers said.

• Remote sensing confirms a shift from long-term freshening to increasing surface salinity south of 50° S, beginning around 2015.
• Denser surface waters are enhancing vertical mixing, allowing warmer subsurface water to reach the surface, accelerating Antarctic ice loss.
• The shift in surface salinity and stratification could impact deep ocean water formation and disrupt components of the global thermohaline circulation, including the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

Earth is expected to spin more quickly in the coming weeks, making some of our days unusually short. On July 9, July 22 and Aug. 5, the position of the moon is expected to affect Earth's rotation so that each day is between 1.3 and 1.51 milliseconds shorter than normal.

A day on Earth is the length of time needed for our planet to fully rotate on its axis — approximately 86,400 seconds, or 24 hours. But Earth's rotation is affected by a number of things, including the positions of the sun and moon, changes to Earth's magnetic field, and the balance of mass on the planet.

Since the relatively early days of our planet, Earth's rotation has been slowing down, making our days longer. Researchers found that about 1 billion to 2 billion years ago, a day on Earth was only 19 hours long. This is likely because the moon was closer to our planet, making its gravitational pull stronger than it is now and causing Earth to spin faster on its axis.

For decades, scientists believed the Arctic Ocean was sealed under a massive slab of ice during the coldest ice ages — but new research proves otherwise. Sediment samples from the seafloor, paired with cutting-edge climate simulations, show that the Arctic actually remained partially open, with seasonal sea ice allowing life to survive in the harshest climates. Traces of ancient algae, thriving only when light and water mix, reveal that the region was never a frozen tomb. This discovery not only reshapes our understanding of Earth’s past but offers vital clues about how the Arctic — and our planet — may respond to climate extremes ahead.

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• ScienceDaily article
• research cited

Scientists analysing the cascading impacts of record low levels of Antarctic sea ice fear a loss of critical US government satellite data will make it harder to track the rapid changes taking place at both poles.

Researchers around the globe were told last week the US Department of Defence will stop processing and providing the data, used in studies on the state of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, at the end of this month.

Tracking the state of sea ice is crucial for scientists to understand how global heating is affecting the planet.

A plume of molten rock rising from the depths of the Earth in heartbeat-like pulses is slowly tearing Africa apart—and will one day create a new ocean.

This is the conclusion of an international team of researchers who have been studying the crust and mantle beneath the Afar region of Ethiopia.

Afar is one of those rare places on Earth where three tectonic rifts meet—specifically, the Ethiopian, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden Rifts.

As tectonic plates are pulled apart at such rift zones, they stretch out and thin until they break, forming a new ocean basin over the course of millions of years.

For more than a century, a patch of cold water south of Greenland has resisted the Atlantic Ocean’s overall warming, fueling debate amongst scientists. A new study identifies the cause as the long-term weakening of a major ocean circulation system.

Researchers from the University of California, Riverside show that only one explanation fits both observed ocean temperatures and salinity patterns: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is slowing down. This massive current system helps regulate climate by moving warm, salty water northward and cooler water southward at depth.

A remote outcrop in Canada harbors rocks that are at least 4.16 billion years old, researchers report June 26 in Science. If true, these rocks would be the oldest known on Earth and the first to date to the planet’s earliest and most mysterious eon.

The finding is the latest salvo in a debate that began in 2008 about the reliability of geochemical methods used to assess the age of this outcrop. In the new study, the scientists bolster their oldest-rock claim by using two distinct methods based on the radioactive decay of elements to date ancient magma that intruded into even older parent rocks. Both methods provided the same 4.16-billion-year-old date.

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• Carbon Brief article
• study cited

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• EcoWatch article
• research cited

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/23410145

• Más de 50 investigadores de siete países dan cuenta de la paulatina degradación de la Antártida: microplásticos en el agua, derretimiento del hielo y pérdida de salinidad del océano austral.
• Dada la conexión que existe entre la Antártida y la Amazonía, los científicos no descartan que en el hielo existan rastros de los incendios forestales.
• La situación es preocupante puesto que la Antártida, aunque remota, tiene una dinámica de conexión constante con el resto del planeta.
• Los cambios que ocurren en ella influyen en la regulación del clima global.

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