Earthquakes
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USGS: Earthquake Magnitude 6.4 - Northern Mid-Atlantic Ridge

Atlantic Quake_240613
© USGS
Event Time
2013-06-24 22:04:13 UTC
2013-06-24 19:04:13 UTC-03:00 at epicenter

Location
10.726°N 42.616°W depth=10.0km (6.2mi)

Nearby Cities
1242km (772mi) ENE of Remire-Montjoly, French Guiana
1248km (775mi) ENE of Cayenne, French Guiana
1252km (778mi) ENE of Matoury, French Guiana
1265km (786mi) ENE of Kourou, French Guiana
1359km (844mi) NNE of Salinopolis, Brazil

Technical Details

Bizarro Earth

Shallow earthquake magnitude 5.2 hits Italy, minor damage in rural areas

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© USGS
A magnitude 5.2 earthquake was felt across central and northern Italy on Friday, causing some minor damage in rural areas but there were no immediate reports of injuries.

The epicentre of the quake, which hit at about 12:33 p.m. (6.33 a.m. EDT) was between the towns of Massa and Lucca in Tuscany and La Spezia in the Liguria region, the national geophysics institute said.

The tremor was felt in Milan, the largest city in northern Italy, and as far north as the Friuli region near the border with Slovenia.

The mayor of Casola in Lunigiana, a small town in the Tuscan countryside, told Italian television the quake had caused cracks in some old buildings and minor collapses but there were no reports of injuries.

Aftershocks continued to rock the area, some as strong as magnitude 4.0, officials said, adding that residents in some rural areas were advised to stay out of their homes for the time being.

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Cascadia fault line in North America: A now still and silent subduction zone where disaster awaits

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On a dark winter's night in January 1700 a tsunami struck Japan. It flooded fields, swept away villages for miles inland and cost many lives. Even as far back as 1700 the Japanese had made the connection between earthquakes and Tsunami, but this time there was no earthquake, no warning to allow the people time to evacuate to higher ground. The tsunami was called the 'orphan tsunami' because it had no 'parent' earthquake. For more than 300 years the origin of the orphan tsunami remained a mystery.

In the 1980s Hiroo Kanamori and Tom Heaton published a paper that said the 1700 tsunami was caused by a massive rupture of the Cascadia fault line that runs off the west coast of the United States from California to Vancouver. In 1987 Brian Atwater studied soil samples far inland across the length of the fault and discovered that the United States had also suffered a tsunami at the same time as the Japanese. He concluded that Kanamori and Heaton were correct, a massive earthquake had sent a tsunami out from the source of the quake inundating the coasts on both sides of the Pacific.

Recent studies by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania has concurred on the findings of previous studies.

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Moderate 5.7 magnitude earthquake shakes buildings in Chile's capital

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© USGS
A magnitude-5.7 earthquake shook central Chile on Wednesday, causing buildings to sway in the capital but apparently causing no major damage. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake struck at 17:29 p.m. local time and its epicenter was about 60 kilometers (37 miles) east-north-east of Los Andes, Chile. Officials discarded the possibility of a tsunami and said there were no immediate reports of deaths or damages. Chile is one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries. A magnitude-8.8 quake and the tsunami it unleashed in 2010 killed more than 500 people and destroyed 220,000 homes. - ABC

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Largest methane seep in the world found off the eastern coast of U.S.

On the seafloor just off of the U.S. East Coast lies a barely known world, explorations of which bring continual surprises. As recently as the mid-2000s, practically zero methane seeps - spots on the seafloor where gas leaks from the Earth's crust - were thought to exist off the East Coast; while one had been reported more than a decade ago, it was thought to be one of a kind. But in the past two years, additional studies have revealed a host of new areas of seafloor rich in seeps, said Laura Brothers, a research geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey. New technologies have allowed scientists to keep locating new seeps, including one that may be the largest in the world. The findings have changed geologists' understanding of the processes taking place beneath the seafloor. "These newly discovered [seafloor] communities show that there is much more seafloor methane venting then we previously thought, and suggests that there are many more seeps out there that we don't know about," Brothers said.
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An even larger, previously unknown vent was found off the coast of Virginia, in research by Steve Ross, a scientist at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and Sandra Brooke, a scientist at Florida State University. Discovered near the Norfolk submarine canyon, the vent is the largest in the Atlantic, and possibly in all of the world's oceans, Ross told LiveScience. North America's continental shelf, the underwater edge of the continent that borders the Atlantic Ocean basin, is littered with underwater canyons etched by rivers thousands of years ago when the region was above sea level.

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Scientists fear tension building on dangerous fault near Istanbul, Turkey

German and Turkish scientists on Tuesday said they had pinpointed an extremely dangerous seismic zone less than 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the historic heart of Istanbul. Running under the Sea of Marmara just south of the city of some 15 million people, this segment of the notorious North Anatolian fault has been worryingly quiet in recent years, which may point to a buildup in tension, they wrote. "The block we identified reaches 10 kilometers (about six miles) deep along the fault zone and has displayed no seismic activity since measurements began over four years ago," said Marco Bohnhoff, a professor at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam, near Berlin. "This could be an indication that the expected Marmara earthquake could originate there."
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The North Anatolian fault, created by the collision of the Anatolia Plate with the Eurasia Plate, runs 1,500 kilometers (950 miles) along northern Turkey. At the western tip of the fault, an earthquake took place in 1912 at Ganos near the Aegean Sea. On its eastern side, a domino series of earthquakes in 1939, 1942, 1951, 1967 and 1999 displaced the stress progressively westwards, bringing it ever closer to Istanbul. What is left now is a so-called earthquake gap under the Sea of Marmara, lying between the two fault stretches whose stress has been eased by the quakes. The "gap" itself, however, has not been relieved by an earthquake since 1766. Seeking a more precise view of the gap, the GFZ and Istanbul's Kandilli Earthquake Observatory set up a network of seismic monitors in the eastern part of the sea. They calculate that the Anatolian fault normally has a westward motion of between 25 and 30 millimeters (one to 1.2 inches) per year.

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Manam volcano erupts in Papua New Guinea

An eruption with a small ash plume was reported this morning and VAAC Darwin issued an advisory. A low level ash plume was also visible on Nasa's Aqua Modis image at 15:45 UTC. This is the volcano's second eruption this year. The volcano unleashed an ash cloud in early January. - Volcano Discovery
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5.6 magnitude quake shakes Peru's capital

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© USGS
A 5.6 magnitude earthquake shook buildings in Peru's capital on Tuesday, Peru's geological survey and Reuters witnesses said.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damages from the quake centered in the Pacific Ocean about 73 kilometers (45 miles) west of the city.

USGS data ranks it at 4.6 magnitude

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Violent explosion shakes Mexico's Popcatepetl volcano

Mexico's active Popocatepetl volcano has registered a massive explosion spewing ash and incandescent rock almost 4 kilometers high. Authorities have warned that winds could blow the ash cloud as far away as Mexico City. Inhabitants of villages up to 25 kilometers from Popocatepetl (colloquially known as 'Don Popo') rushed out of their houses when the massive explosion reverberated through their homes. Esther Matinez, resident of Amecameca municipality, told Mexican publication La Jornada that the blast was like a rocket explosion. Around 4.5 million people live within a 50-kilometer radius of the active volcano, 650,000 of whom are considered to be at high risk.


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Massive section of ocean floor off the coast of Portugal beginning to fracture

A new subduction zone forming off the coast of Portugal heralds the beginning of a cycle that will see the Atlantic Ocean close, as continental Europe moves closer to America. Published in Geology, new research led by Monash University geologists has detected the first evidence that a passive margin in the Atlantic Ocean is becoming active. Subduction zones, such as the one beginning near Iberia, are areas where one of the tectonic plates that cover Earth's surface dives beneath another plate into the mantle - the layer just below the crust. Lead author Dr João Duarte, from the School of Geosciences said the team mapped the ocean floor and found it was beginning to fracture, indicating tectonic activity around the apparently passive South West Iberia plate margin. "What we have detected is the very beginnings of an active margin - it's like an embryonic subduction zone," Dr Duarte said.
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