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Categories: Geoscience: Earthquakes, Mathematics: Puzzles

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Geologists have reconstructed a massive and previously unknown tectonic plate that was once one-quarter the size of the Pacific Ocean. The team had predicted its existence over 10 years ago based on fragments of old tectonic plates found deep in the Earth’s mantle. To the lead researchers surprise, she found that oceanic remnants on northern Borneo must have belonged to the long-suspected plate, which scientists have named Pontus. She has now reconstructed the entire plate in its full glory.

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A new attempt to predict earthquakes has raised hopes that artificial intelligence could one day be used to limit earthquakes’ impact on lives and economies. The AI algorithm correctly predicted 70% of earthquakes a week before they happened during a seven-month trial in China. The system is limited because the AI needs an extensive database and years of seismic recordings to train itself on, but researchers said the effort is nonetheless a milestone for AI-driven earthquake forecasting. Researchers will soon begin testing the system at other locations.

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Researchers working to image New Zealand's Hikurangi earthquake fault have uncovered a sea's worth of water buried in the Earth's crust. The water was carried down by eroding volcanic rocks and is believed to be dampening the earthquake fault, allowing it to release most of the pent-up tectonic stress through harmless slow slip earthquakes.

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Tree rings reveal a new kind of earthquake threat to the Pacific Northwest. These findings could have implications for seismic preparedness measures in the region.

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The mechanism facilitating the smooth movement of the oceanic lithosphere over the underlying asthenosphere (upper mantle) remains poorly understood. Recently, researchers from Japan investigated the effect of water on the seismic properties of olivine rocks, finding that water retention in the asthenosphere can induce sharp drops in shear wave velocity. This also explained other seismic changes observed at the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary. These findings provide invaluable insights into the diverse seismic activities on Earth.

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New research has used machine learning to find the properties of atomic pieces of geometry, in pioneering work that could drive the development of new results in mathematics.

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Fires that raged in the days following the 1 September 1923 magnitude 7.9 Kant earthquake killed roughly 90% of the 105,000 people who perished in and around Tokyo, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in history -- comparable to the number of people killed in the World War II atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The story of the conflagration, not well-known outside of Japan, holds important lessons for earthquake scientists, emergency response teams and city planners, according to a new article.

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Hadal trenches, with their deepest locations situated in the so-called hadal zone, the deepest parts of the ocean in water depth >6km, are the least-explored environment on Earth, linking the Earth's surface and its deeper interior. An international team conducting deep-subsurface sampling in a hadal trench at high spatial resolution has revealed exciting insights on the carbon cycling in the trench sediment.

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Digital information exchange can be safer, cheaper and more environmentally friendly with the help of a new type of random number generator for encryption. The researchers behind the study believe that the new technology paves the way for a new type of quantum communication.

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Legal restrictions placed on the amount of time young people in China can play video games may be less effective than originally thought, a new study has revealed.

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New research confirms fracking causes slow, small earthquakes or tremors, whose origin was previously a mystery to scientists. The tremors are produced by the same processes that could create large, damaging earthquakes.

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In prehistoric societies, humans tended to learn from members of our ingroup or from more prestigious individuals, as this information was more likely to be reliable and result in group success. However, with the advent of diverse and complex modern communities -- and especially in social media -- these biases become less effective. For example, a person we are connected to online might not necessarily be trustworthy, and people can easily feign prestige on social media. Now, a group of social scientists describe how the functions of social media algorithms are misaligned with human social instincts meant to foster cooperation, which can lead to large-scale polarization and misinformation.

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The same fiber optic networks that provide internet can simultaneously act as earthquake sensors, as demonstrated in a new study.

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An interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and medical scientists has uncovered an unexpected link between pure mathematics and genetics, that reveals key insights into the structure of neutral mutations and the evolution of organisms.

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A new study uses nearly a century of data to show that the average heights of winter waves along the California coast have increased as climate change has heated up the planet.

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Slow earthquakes are slow-slip phenomena that last many days or months, and you barely notice them. In 2007, researchers proposed how the magnitude and duration of earthquakes vary, which can help differentiate slow and fast earthquakes. Seismologists now bolster the proposed relation with more data. They suggest the presence of a speed limit to slow earthquakes and reveal physical processes that differentiate slow and fast earthquakes. Since slow earthquakes could indicate future fast earthquakes, monitoring and understanding them helps accurately forecast devastating earthquakes and tsunamis.

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Much of central Utah's seismic activity comes in groups of small earthquakes. A study by seismologists examines 2,300 quakes occurring 40 'swarms' dating back to 1981, opening a window into Earth's crust in a geothermally active area.

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Board games based on numbers, like Monopoly, Othello and Chutes and Ladders, make young children better at math, according to a comprehensive review of research published on the topic over the last 23 years.

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Scientists used seismic data discovered Earth's inner core displays a variety of textures that it acquired will it formed from within the fluid outer core. The data set was generated over the past 27 years by a network of seismometers set up to enforce the nuclear test ban treaty.

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An international research team has discovered that a subduction zone's age affects the ability for it to recycle water between the Earth's surface and its inner layers. The more mature the subduction zone, the bigger the water storage capacity.