geology

Scientific research has helped humankind avoid or mitigate many of nature’s best attempts to send us to a violent end, but what do researchers do when the pursuit of research could trigger the very disaster from which science is trying to protect us? That’s the question facing geologists in Naples, Italy that will begin sinking seven four-kilometer bore holes into the Campi Flegrei caldera, the site of a “supercolossal” volcanic eruption 39,000 years ago.

In 2005, we came the closest we ever had before to drilling into the mantle: the layer beneath the Earth's crust. Now, with new drilling technology adapted from the oil and gas industry, scientists might finally be ready to reach that holy grail of depth.

This morning, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck Belize and Honduras, resulting a few fatalities and some property damage.

Paul Earl, a seismologist with the United States Geological Survey, told Popsci.com that the quake emanated from the Swan Island Transform fault, a strike-slip fault not unlike the San Andreas fault in California. Both the location -- 80 miles off shore -- and the type of fault helped minimize the destruction caused by the event.

As a respite from the nonstop flu blogging, I decided it was time to have a little fun and show the lighter side of science.

First up is a story from the Wall Street Journal about the residents of Tuscarora, Nevada, driving off a swarm of insects by blasting Led Zeppelin.

Dan Lathrop needs a bigger Earth. His old one is two feet across and 500 pounds, about 20 millionths the size of the real thing. And after four years of tests, it failed to generate a magnetic field similar to the real Earth’s, which shields us from the sun’s radiation and guides some navigation systems by pointing compasses north.

A new study by the University of Alberta suggests that a massive undersea volcano eruption 93 million years ago was the source of much of the world’s oil.

Researchers Steven Turgeon and Robert Creaser were alerted to the prehistoric blast when they found specific levels of osmium isotopes (indicators of volcanic activity in sea water) in black shale rocks off the coast of South America and in the mountains of central Italy.

Mercury's magnetic field is about 100 times weaker than that of the Earth - a curiosity that scientists have been trying to make sense of for years.

Recent observations of Mercury's rotation suggest that the planet has a partially molten core, and scientists at the University of Illinois and Case Western Reserve University developed laboratory experiments to model what might be happening beneath the surface.

An earthquake is a sudden release of stress that has built up along a fault line, where rock faces push against each other. If that stress could be released over a longer period of time—with a series of smaller quakes—the result might be less catastrophic.

Engineers have known for 40 years that injecting fluids deep into wells can accidentally trigger mini—quakes by lubricating “sticky” rock faces. Since that time, there have been numerous proposals to pump fluids into stressed fault lines.