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"title": "Remembering Professor Terry Wright, A Creative Juggler of Scientific Ideas",
"headTitle": "Remembering Professor Terry Wright, A Creative Juggler of Scientific Ideas | KQED",
"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9602\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/10/terry1.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9602\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9602\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/10/terry1.jpg\" alt=\"Geologist's garden\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A geologist’s desert rock garden\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>We’re often told that science is a long conversation, conducted over centuries and across oceans through the medium of papers and books. Among more reflective physicists, for instance, you get a sense that Isaac Newton is still there in the room along with Einstein and Schrodinger and all of their more modern peers. You might think that geologists are even more that way, with their faraway eyes focused on the deep past or miles underground or imagining vanished lands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But judging from my several decades among geologists, their research comunity is more like an immense group performance of jugglers. Ideas are tossed from hand to hand as prolifically as email, and just as it is with the \u003ca href=\"http://www.fkb.com/\">Flying Karamazov Brothers\u003c/a>, trust among the participants is supreme. Geoscience is a deeply personal field. Today I want to remember a juggler-geologist named Terry Wright, a local professor who died early last month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Terry earned his Ph.D. in 1970 and soon found his life’s role at Sonoma State University, where he was one of the founding professors of its geology department. He did not become a giant of ideas, but he had a gift for connection with his peers and students. He welcomed you into the room in many senses, whether it was his hotel room full of bottles of wine, the geologist’s world of rocks and landforms, his retirement home near the White Mountains, or the great juggling act of working scientists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I first met Terry when we both signed up for a 1999 field trip to Napa Valley wineries and their rocks. He was the hearty fellow who, at lunchtime, brought out what must have been a whole case of mixed wines for us to taste. It turned out that in addition to his expertise in earthquakes and structural geology, he was a keen student of terroir and advised winegrowers as a sideline business.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We didn’t forget each other. I don’t think he forgot anybody. I would run into him at scientific meetings and he was always fully present. More than once I ended up at one of his hotel-room bashes in the midst of a happy crowd. It turned out that Terry loved nothing more than going places and being places, whether it was the giant Phoenix gem and mineral show or hot-springing in the remote Saline Valley with his gang of desert rats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I picked up a \u003ca href=\"http://geology.about.com/od/bookreviews/gr/heimoffwine.htm\">book on Russian River winemaking\u003c/a> a few years later, there was Terry in his canoe, sharing his deep knowledge of the terrain with wine writer \u003ca href=\"http://www.steveheimoff.com/\">Steve Heimoff\u003c/a>. It turned out that Terry and his wife had started one of the first whitewater river-running outfits. I think that this may be my truest image of him: paddling on a wilderness river, shouting out the passing sights in a geological running travelogue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Terry retired in 2006 and got his second home in far-off Benton, California, I made a point of showing up for his welcoming party. He insisted that I photograph a large, beautiful specimen of rock folds for my About.com website. He told me he’d carried the watermelon-sized boulder out of backwoods Montana to show his students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/2013/10/03/remembering-professor-terry-wright-a-creative-juggler-of-scientific-ideas/terry3/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9603\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-9603\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/10/terry3.jpg\" alt=\"folds in rock\" width=\"600\" height=\"421\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After Terry retired he began attending the Burning Man festival each year to lecture, in full costume, on geology. He loved the scene, and perhaps that was his truest image of himself: sharing his visionary science in a great carnival classroom, like a dealer of precious things in a bazaar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He also carried on educating people in other ways. He updated a river guide, “Rocks and Rapids of the Tuolumne River.” He worked up virtual field trips to localities in Sonoma County, including \u003ca href=\"http://www.terrywrightgeology.com/shellbeach.html\">Shell Beach\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.terrywrightgeology.com/bodega.html\">Bodega Head\u003c/a>. He produced illustrations for t-shirts that were irresistible to other geologists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9604\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 517px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/10/sonomasection.gif\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9604\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9604\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/10/sonomasection.gif\" alt=\"sonoma county profile\" width=\"517\" height=\"398\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The intrigue of a geologic cross section rendered for t-shirts by Terry Wright\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>A couple years ago I took \u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/2012/03/22/testing-a-new-drug-for-mountain-sickness/\">a short trip to the White Mountains\u003c/a> and spent a night by myself at his place. As the sun set on the panorama, I found myself drawn to the informal clutter of his desert estate. Here was the folded boulder again; there was a bowl of round granite cobbles awaiting a juggler’s hands; elsewhere were bits of wrought iron and machinery scrap, slowly weathering back to the ores of their origin. A tray of hand specimens on a table posed a dozen different puzzles, but Terry wasn’t there to explain them. Maybe, like me, he simply picked them up to wonder about them. Now he’s no longer here to explain any of them. But he made sure to pass along as much of his knowledge as he could for the rest of us—students, fellow scientists and passers-by—to keep in the air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/2013/10/03/remembering-professor-terry-wright-a-creative-juggler-of-scientific-ideas/terry2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9605\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-9605\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/10/terry2.jpg\" alt=\"pebbles on a tray\" width=\"600\" height=\"442\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9602\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/10/terry1.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9602\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9602\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/10/terry1.jpg\" alt=\"Geologist's garden\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A geologist’s desert rock garden\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>We’re often told that science is a long conversation, conducted over centuries and across oceans through the medium of papers and books. Among more reflective physicists, for instance, you get a sense that Isaac Newton is still there in the room along with Einstein and Schrodinger and all of their more modern peers. You might think that geologists are even more that way, with their faraway eyes focused on the deep past or miles underground or imagining vanished lands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But judging from my several decades among geologists, their research comunity is more like an immense group performance of jugglers. Ideas are tossed from hand to hand as prolifically as email, and just as it is with the \u003ca href=\"http://www.fkb.com/\">Flying Karamazov Brothers\u003c/a>, trust among the participants is supreme. Geoscience is a deeply personal field. Today I want to remember a juggler-geologist named Terry Wright, a local professor who died early last month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Terry earned his Ph.D. in 1970 and soon found his life’s role at Sonoma State University, where he was one of the founding professors of its geology department. He did not become a giant of ideas, but he had a gift for connection with his peers and students. He welcomed you into the room in many senses, whether it was his hotel room full of bottles of wine, the geologist’s world of rocks and landforms, his retirement home near the White Mountains, or the great juggling act of working scientists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I first met Terry when we both signed up for a 1999 field trip to Napa Valley wineries and their rocks. He was the hearty fellow who, at lunchtime, brought out what must have been a whole case of mixed wines for us to taste. It turned out that in addition to his expertise in earthquakes and structural geology, he was a keen student of terroir and advised winegrowers as a sideline business.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We didn’t forget each other. I don’t think he forgot anybody. I would run into him at scientific meetings and he was always fully present. More than once I ended up at one of his hotel-room bashes in the midst of a happy crowd. It turned out that Terry loved nothing more than going places and being places, whether it was the giant Phoenix gem and mineral show or hot-springing in the remote Saline Valley with his gang of desert rats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I picked up a \u003ca href=\"http://geology.about.com/od/bookreviews/gr/heimoffwine.htm\">book on Russian River winemaking\u003c/a> a few years later, there was Terry in his canoe, sharing his deep knowledge of the terrain with wine writer \u003ca href=\"http://www.steveheimoff.com/\">Steve Heimoff\u003c/a>. It turned out that Terry and his wife had started one of the first whitewater river-running outfits. I think that this may be my truest image of him: paddling on a wilderness river, shouting out the passing sights in a geological running travelogue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Terry retired in 2006 and got his second home in far-off Benton, California, I made a point of showing up for his welcoming party. He insisted that I photograph a large, beautiful specimen of rock folds for my About.com website. He told me he’d carried the watermelon-sized boulder out of backwoods Montana to show his students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/2013/10/03/remembering-professor-terry-wright-a-creative-juggler-of-scientific-ideas/terry3/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9603\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-9603\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/10/terry3.jpg\" alt=\"folds in rock\" width=\"600\" height=\"421\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After Terry retired he began attending the Burning Man festival each year to lecture, in full costume, on geology. He loved the scene, and perhaps that was his truest image of himself: sharing his visionary science in a great carnival classroom, like a dealer of precious things in a bazaar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He also carried on educating people in other ways. He updated a river guide, “Rocks and Rapids of the Tuolumne River.” He worked up virtual field trips to localities in Sonoma County, including \u003ca href=\"http://www.terrywrightgeology.com/shellbeach.html\">Shell Beach\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.terrywrightgeology.com/bodega.html\">Bodega Head\u003c/a>. He produced illustrations for t-shirts that were irresistible to other geologists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9604\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 517px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/10/sonomasection.gif\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9604\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9604\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/10/sonomasection.gif\" alt=\"sonoma county profile\" width=\"517\" height=\"398\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The intrigue of a geologic cross section rendered for t-shirts by Terry Wright\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>A couple years ago I took \u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/2012/03/22/testing-a-new-drug-for-mountain-sickness/\">a short trip to the White Mountains\u003c/a> and spent a night by myself at his place. As the sun set on the panorama, I found myself drawn to the informal clutter of his desert estate. Here was the folded boulder again; there was a bowl of round granite cobbles awaiting a juggler’s hands; elsewhere were bits of wrought iron and machinery scrap, slowly weathering back to the ores of their origin. A tray of hand specimens on a table posed a dozen different puzzles, but Terry wasn’t there to explain them. Maybe, like me, he simply picked them up to wonder about them. Now he’s no longer here to explain any of them. But he made sure to pass along as much of his knowledge as he could for the rest of us—students, fellow scientists and passers-by—to keep in the air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/2013/10/03/remembering-professor-terry-wright-a-creative-juggler-of-scientific-ideas/terry2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9605\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-9605\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/10/terry2.jpg\" alt=\"pebbles on a tray\" width=\"600\" height=\"442\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Pakistan's New Earthquake Island: Can It Happen Here?",
"headTitle": "Pakistan’s New Earthquake Island: Can It Happen Here? | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>When Pakistan was struck by a major earthquake earlier this week, one of its side effects seemed to capture the attention of the news services: several hundred miles from the shock, a small island rose above the waves of the Arabian Sea. Could America see the same thing when we get our next big earthquake? Very possibly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9329\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/Pakisland.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9329\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/Pakisland.jpg\" alt=\"Pakistan mud volcano\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9329\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Pakistan’s newest island, thrust above the sea off the coast of Gwadar. Pakistan Government/AFP\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Details are sparse, but at least two new islands appeared off southern Pakistan in the hours after the distant shaking stopped. The one shown in the photo was about 100 yards long, about half as wide and about 50 feet high. It was peppered with bubbling mudpots emitting enough methane gas to be an explosive hazard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The signs are those of \u003ca href=\"http://geology.about.com/od/structureslandforms/ig/Depositional-Landforms/mud_volcano.htm\">mud volcanism\u003c/a>, a kind of cold eruption powered by high-pressure underground fluids. In this case the fluid would be natural gas (methane) and probably some brine along with it. The distant earthquake presumably caused this by disturbing a delicately balanced situation in which the fluids were very close to eruption already. Perhaps the gas had been seeping out in a stable way, and the extra shaking pushed it too far. Perhaps a near-shore landslide set things off. The best guess is that deeply buried beds of methane hydrate “ice” released a large amount of gas after the shaking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only an expensive, rapid scientific expedition can allow us to learn the real scenario, and that won’t happen—the sea will wipe the island off the map in a few months. But we can look at the general tectonic setting at the large scale, courtesy of the \u003ca href=\"http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/\">U.S. Geological Survey’s earthquake viewer\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9330\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 625px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/PakEQmap.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9330\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/PakEQmap.png\" alt=\"Pakistan tectonic map\" width=\"625\" height=\"452\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9330\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Heavy red lines are plate boundaries.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Tuesday’s earthquake and its aftershocks appear as dots in the mountains of Baluchistan. The new island appeared at Gwadar. Tectonically, this area, known as the Makran, is being squeezed and crumpled as Arabia pushes northward into Eurasia. The natural gas in the young rocks of the Makran and the offshore sediments are free to move in this setting—it is as if the Yucatan were pushing the Gulf of Mexico shut against New Orleans, allowing the buried oil and gas (and methane hydrates) of the Gulf to escape.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s no place exactly like that in the United States, where two continents are colliding. However, southern Alaska and the Santa Barbara coast are similar. Let’s look at California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/2013/09/26/pakistans-new-earthquake-island-can-it-happen-here/califtecmap/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9331\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/Califtecmap.png\" alt=\"Califtecmap\" width=\"500\" height=\"300\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-9331\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Pacific plate is moving north-northwest against a bend in the San Andreas fault (the heavy red line marking the plate boundary), which is why the Transverse Ranges are rising there. The ocean basins off the Southern California coast are full of oil and gas, and the large islands of the California Continental Borderland are approaching the mainland there. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The last magnitude-7 earthquake to happen off Santa Barbara was in 1812. Records are very scant, of course, and short-lived islands may well have appeared at the time. We’ll know for sure when the next big one hits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California has many mud volcanoes in the Salton Sea area, where I took this photo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9332\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/Saltonmudvolcs.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9332\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/Saltonmudvolcs.jpg\" alt=\"California mud volcanoes\" width=\"600\" height=\"401\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9332\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Davis-Schrimpf mud volcano field\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These are basically hydrothermal in origin, like the mudpots of Mount Lassen or Yellowstone. Parts of the Salton Sea basin are actually seafloor spreading centers, just like those in the deep seas, that the Colorado River has buried kilometers deep in mud. \u003ca href=\"http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/81winter/mud.htm\">Historical reports\u003c/a> from the 1850s until the 1907 flooding of the Salton basin describe spectacular eruptions that threw steam a thousand feet in the air. You don’t have to be in remotest Pakistan to live in an exotic and occasionally terrifying place.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>When Pakistan was struck by a major earthquake earlier this week, one of its side effects seemed to capture the attention of the news services: several hundred miles from the shock, a small island rose above the waves of the Arabian Sea. Could America see the same thing when we get our next big earthquake? Very possibly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9329\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/Pakisland.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9329\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/Pakisland.jpg\" alt=\"Pakistan mud volcano\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9329\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Pakistan’s newest island, thrust above the sea off the coast of Gwadar. Pakistan Government/AFP\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Details are sparse, but at least two new islands appeared off southern Pakistan in the hours after the distant shaking stopped. The one shown in the photo was about 100 yards long, about half as wide and about 50 feet high. It was peppered with bubbling mudpots emitting enough methane gas to be an explosive hazard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The signs are those of \u003ca href=\"http://geology.about.com/od/structureslandforms/ig/Depositional-Landforms/mud_volcano.htm\">mud volcanism\u003c/a>, a kind of cold eruption powered by high-pressure underground fluids. In this case the fluid would be natural gas (methane) and probably some brine along with it. The distant earthquake presumably caused this by disturbing a delicately balanced situation in which the fluids were very close to eruption already. Perhaps the gas had been seeping out in a stable way, and the extra shaking pushed it too far. Perhaps a near-shore landslide set things off. The best guess is that deeply buried beds of methane hydrate “ice” released a large amount of gas after the shaking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only an expensive, rapid scientific expedition can allow us to learn the real scenario, and that won’t happen—the sea will wipe the island off the map in a few months. But we can look at the general tectonic setting at the large scale, courtesy of the \u003ca href=\"http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/\">U.S. Geological Survey’s earthquake viewer\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9330\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 625px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/PakEQmap.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9330\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/PakEQmap.png\" alt=\"Pakistan tectonic map\" width=\"625\" height=\"452\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9330\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Heavy red lines are plate boundaries.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Tuesday’s earthquake and its aftershocks appear as dots in the mountains of Baluchistan. The new island appeared at Gwadar. Tectonically, this area, known as the Makran, is being squeezed and crumpled as Arabia pushes northward into Eurasia. The natural gas in the young rocks of the Makran and the offshore sediments are free to move in this setting—it is as if the Yucatan were pushing the Gulf of Mexico shut against New Orleans, allowing the buried oil and gas (and methane hydrates) of the Gulf to escape.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s no place exactly like that in the United States, where two continents are colliding. However, southern Alaska and the Santa Barbara coast are similar. Let’s look at California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/2013/09/26/pakistans-new-earthquake-island-can-it-happen-here/califtecmap/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9331\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/Califtecmap.png\" alt=\"Califtecmap\" width=\"500\" height=\"300\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-9331\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Pacific plate is moving north-northwest against a bend in the San Andreas fault (the heavy red line marking the plate boundary), which is why the Transverse Ranges are rising there. The ocean basins off the Southern California coast are full of oil and gas, and the large islands of the California Continental Borderland are approaching the mainland there. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The last magnitude-7 earthquake to happen off Santa Barbara was in 1812. Records are very scant, of course, and short-lived islands may well have appeared at the time. We’ll know for sure when the next big one hits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California has many mud volcanoes in the Salton Sea area, where I took this photo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9332\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/Saltonmudvolcs.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9332\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/Saltonmudvolcs.jpg\" alt=\"California mud volcanoes\" width=\"600\" height=\"401\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9332\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Davis-Schrimpf mud volcano field\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These are basically hydrothermal in origin, like the mudpots of Mount Lassen or Yellowstone. Parts of the Salton Sea basin are actually seafloor spreading centers, just like those in the deep seas, that the Colorado River has buried kilometers deep in mud. \u003ca href=\"http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/81winter/mud.htm\">Historical reports\u003c/a> from the 1850s until the 1907 flooding of the Salton basin describe spectacular eruptions that threw steam a thousand feet in the air. You don’t have to be in remotest Pakistan to live in an exotic and occasionally terrifying place.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "New Research Sheds Light on Earthquakes That Occur Far Below Earth's Surface",
"headTitle": "New Research Sheds Light on Earthquakes That Occur Far Below Earth’s Surface | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Four months ago, a very large earthquake occurred beneath far easternmost Russia, but not even the locals paid it much notice because it was far away from everyone—609 kilometers (378 miles) straight down from a point in the Sea of Okhotsk. Within the hour, though, seismologists around the world were buzzing because it appeared to be a record-setting event. A paper published in \u003cem>Science\u003c/em> today confirms that the May 24 Russian quake was the largest deep earthquake ever recorded, and also shows that it was quite different from the previous record-holder, a 1994 event 637 kilometers beneath Bolivia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The world’s deepest earthquakes don’t make much of a ruckus in human terms, but seismologists are deeply interested in them because they’re not supposed to happen. Rocks soften as they heat up, and at depths below around 50 kilometers they’re generally so hot that they flow instead of breaking. No rupturing means no earthquakes. That’s why the San Andreas fault just peters out at its base, and it’s a major reason why the Earth’s outer shell can slide around in continent-sized pieces called tectonic plates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nevertheless, somehow certain rocks can rupture and release stress—creating earthquakes—as deep as 700 kilometers, the boundary between the upper and lower mantle. So deep quakes are potent clues to interesting science in a part of the earth where we have almost no direct evidence. Deep quakes happen where plates are being pulled down into the mantle in the process called subduction. Subducting plates are naturally much colder than the rock around them, so the general thinking is that they remain brittle to a greater depth. But the details are still puzzling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the \u003cem>Science\u003c/em> paper, a team including UC Santa Cruz’s Thorne Lay and his graduate student Lingling Ye assigned the 2013 Russia quake the same magnitude, 8.3, as the 1994 Bolivia quake. But in fact it had one-third more energy, just not enough for an 8.4. So that was a nice thing to learn. The team relied on the excellent data from the USArray network, a decade-long experiment that’s been stationing large groups of seismometers around the country in a gigantic version of a doctor positioning a stethoscope on a patient’s body. Here’s a snapshot of the seismic waves from the 2013 quake sweeping from Russia across the USArray.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9038\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 625px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/deepEQ-IRISmap.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9038\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9038\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/deepEQ-IRISmap.png\" alt=\"Seismic waves from the Russia earthquake of 24 May 2013\" width=\"625\" height=\"400\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From the \u003ca href=\"http://www.iris.edu/hq/retm\">Recent Earthquake Teachable Moments\u003c/a> page of the IRIS consortium. This is one frame of an animation of the 2013 Sea of Okhotsk earthquake records. The total up-and-down ground motion was about half a millimeter.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Ye and Lay’s team mapped the deep rupture as a large, nearly horizontal fault inside the subducting plate. They were able to determine that the upper side of the fault slid and scraped over the bottom side more than 30 feet (9.9 meters) in 30 seconds. They detected only a few small aftershocks, but that’s common in deep earthquakes—the long-lasting aftershock sequences familiar in shallow quakes are muffled in these deep-seated rocks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9039\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 601px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/deepEQmap.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9039\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9039\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/deepEQmap.png\" alt=\"Rupture zone of the 2013 Sea of Okhotsk quake\" width=\"601\" height=\"400\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rupture zone of the 2013 Sea of Okhotsk quake mapped in pink; each ring inside the outline represents 2.2 meters of slip. Blue dots are aftershocks, each about magnitude 4. Large round symbols show the orientation of the slip motion for the 8.3 quake and two earlier earthquakes in 2008. Dashed contour lines show the top of the subducting Pacific plate. Arrows show the motion of the rock during the rupture. The land on the east is the west coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula. From figure 1 of Ye et al., “Energy release of the 2013 M\u003csub>w\u003c/sub> 8.3 Sea of Okhotsk earthquake and deep slab stress heterogeneity,” \u003cem>Science\u003c/em> vol. 341, pp. 1380-1384.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Compared to the 1994 Bolivia quake, the 2013 Russia event was much louder—that is, it sent out more of its energy as seismic waves. The speed at which the rock ruptured was four times greater in Russia than in Bolivia. And the amount of stress released at a given spot was much smaller in Russia than in Bolivia. In these respects the Russia quake resembled shallow earthquakes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These differences, the authors reasoned, come from differences in the two subducting plates. In Bolivia the young, relatively warm Nazca plate is subducting beneath South America whereas in the Sea of Okhotsk the subducting Pacific plate is very old (about 100 million years), making it much colder and thicker. In Bolivia more of the earthquake’s energy went into friction and heating—perhaps even melting—of the rock, but in Russia the colder, stiffer rock passed the energy through as vibrations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The authors studied one magnitude-6.7 aftershock of the Russia quake that acted very much like the Bolivia quake: its stress drop was dozens of times as great as the mainshock. They concluded that this points to a mixture of structures in the subducting plate rather than a homogeneous slab of rock: “The stress drops found for the 2013 mainshock and large aftershock suggest preexisting zones with strong and weak regions, likely inherited from shallow faulting” earlier in the history of the plate. “Weak” means brittle, what we would think of as strong, solid rock, and “strong” means relatively soft rock that prefers to warp slowly, with lots of friction, rather than rupture quickly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This points to a picture of deeply subducted plates that are a heterogeneous mixture of weak and strong patches. In a place like Bolivia, strong patches outnumber weak ones, and the opposite is true in a place like the Sea of Okhotsk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That still doesn’t tell us exactly what kind of rupture happens in these very deep earthquakes. The kind of simple cracking we see in surface quakes is forbidden by the physics down there. We think that “phase transformations” of minerals are involved, in which the atoms reconfigure themselves into a new crystalline arrangement better suited to the high-pressure environment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another paper in the same issue of \u003cem>Science \u003c/em>reported high-pressure experiments demonstrating just that in olivine, the most common mineral of the mantle. Squeezing things at high pressure is fairly easy in the lab, but squeezing a sample and deforming it at the same time at 1000°C takes our cleverest people and equipment. An international team led by Alexandre Schubnel of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris not only did that, but reproduced microscopic versions of deep earthquakes in 3-millimeter cylinders of olivine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9040\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/microfaults.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9040\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9040\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/microfaults.png\" alt=\"Nanofaults in olivine\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Faults (thin gray lines) in olivine. White grains are enstatite; note that some are split and offset along the faults. Part of figure S4 of Schubnel et al., “Deep-focus earthquake analogs recorded at high pressure and temperature in the laboratory,” \u003cem>Science\u003c/em> vol. 341, pp. 1377-1380.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>X-ray analyses showed them that about 5 percent of the samples had undergone a phase transformation from the olivine molecular structure to the spinel structure—exactly what is called for in deep earthquakes. It looked like a very clean result: “No evidence of melting or amorphous material was found at any scale, implying that the phase transformation was essentially instantaneous during fault propagation.” They also detected sounds in the samples that correspond nicely with what we call earthquakes when they’re a million times larger.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When we seek to understand events deep in the mantle, techniques like those used in these two papers are all we have. It’s a marvel when the progress we make is so clear-cut.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Four months ago, a very large earthquake occurred beneath far easternmost Russia, but not even the locals paid it much notice because it was far away from everyone—609 kilometers (378 miles) straight down from a point in the Sea of Okhotsk. Within the hour, though, seismologists around the world were buzzing because it appeared to be a record-setting event. A paper published in \u003cem>Science\u003c/em> today confirms that the May 24 Russian quake was the largest deep earthquake ever recorded, and also shows that it was quite different from the previous record-holder, a 1994 event 637 kilometers beneath Bolivia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The world’s deepest earthquakes don’t make much of a ruckus in human terms, but seismologists are deeply interested in them because they’re not supposed to happen. Rocks soften as they heat up, and at depths below around 50 kilometers they’re generally so hot that they flow instead of breaking. No rupturing means no earthquakes. That’s why the San Andreas fault just peters out at its base, and it’s a major reason why the Earth’s outer shell can slide around in continent-sized pieces called tectonic plates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nevertheless, somehow certain rocks can rupture and release stress—creating earthquakes—as deep as 700 kilometers, the boundary between the upper and lower mantle. So deep quakes are potent clues to interesting science in a part of the earth where we have almost no direct evidence. Deep quakes happen where plates are being pulled down into the mantle in the process called subduction. Subducting plates are naturally much colder than the rock around them, so the general thinking is that they remain brittle to a greater depth. But the details are still puzzling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the \u003cem>Science\u003c/em> paper, a team including UC Santa Cruz’s Thorne Lay and his graduate student Lingling Ye assigned the 2013 Russia quake the same magnitude, 8.3, as the 1994 Bolivia quake. But in fact it had one-third more energy, just not enough for an 8.4. So that was a nice thing to learn. The team relied on the excellent data from the USArray network, a decade-long experiment that’s been stationing large groups of seismometers around the country in a gigantic version of a doctor positioning a stethoscope on a patient’s body. Here’s a snapshot of the seismic waves from the 2013 quake sweeping from Russia across the USArray.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9038\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 625px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/deepEQ-IRISmap.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9038\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9038\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/deepEQ-IRISmap.png\" alt=\"Seismic waves from the Russia earthquake of 24 May 2013\" width=\"625\" height=\"400\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From the \u003ca href=\"http://www.iris.edu/hq/retm\">Recent Earthquake Teachable Moments\u003c/a> page of the IRIS consortium. This is one frame of an animation of the 2013 Sea of Okhotsk earthquake records. The total up-and-down ground motion was about half a millimeter.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Ye and Lay’s team mapped the deep rupture as a large, nearly horizontal fault inside the subducting plate. They were able to determine that the upper side of the fault slid and scraped over the bottom side more than 30 feet (9.9 meters) in 30 seconds. They detected only a few small aftershocks, but that’s common in deep earthquakes—the long-lasting aftershock sequences familiar in shallow quakes are muffled in these deep-seated rocks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9039\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 601px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/deepEQmap.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9039\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9039\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/deepEQmap.png\" alt=\"Rupture zone of the 2013 Sea of Okhotsk quake\" width=\"601\" height=\"400\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rupture zone of the 2013 Sea of Okhotsk quake mapped in pink; each ring inside the outline represents 2.2 meters of slip. Blue dots are aftershocks, each about magnitude 4. Large round symbols show the orientation of the slip motion for the 8.3 quake and two earlier earthquakes in 2008. Dashed contour lines show the top of the subducting Pacific plate. Arrows show the motion of the rock during the rupture. The land on the east is the west coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula. From figure 1 of Ye et al., “Energy release of the 2013 M\u003csub>w\u003c/sub> 8.3 Sea of Okhotsk earthquake and deep slab stress heterogeneity,” \u003cem>Science\u003c/em> vol. 341, pp. 1380-1384.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Compared to the 1994 Bolivia quake, the 2013 Russia event was much louder—that is, it sent out more of its energy as seismic waves. The speed at which the rock ruptured was four times greater in Russia than in Bolivia. And the amount of stress released at a given spot was much smaller in Russia than in Bolivia. In these respects the Russia quake resembled shallow earthquakes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These differences, the authors reasoned, come from differences in the two subducting plates. In Bolivia the young, relatively warm Nazca plate is subducting beneath South America whereas in the Sea of Okhotsk the subducting Pacific plate is very old (about 100 million years), making it much colder and thicker. In Bolivia more of the earthquake’s energy went into friction and heating—perhaps even melting—of the rock, but in Russia the colder, stiffer rock passed the energy through as vibrations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The authors studied one magnitude-6.7 aftershock of the Russia quake that acted very much like the Bolivia quake: its stress drop was dozens of times as great as the mainshock. They concluded that this points to a mixture of structures in the subducting plate rather than a homogeneous slab of rock: “The stress drops found for the 2013 mainshock and large aftershock suggest preexisting zones with strong and weak regions, likely inherited from shallow faulting” earlier in the history of the plate. “Weak” means brittle, what we would think of as strong, solid rock, and “strong” means relatively soft rock that prefers to warp slowly, with lots of friction, rather than rupture quickly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This points to a picture of deeply subducted plates that are a heterogeneous mixture of weak and strong patches. In a place like Bolivia, strong patches outnumber weak ones, and the opposite is true in a place like the Sea of Okhotsk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That still doesn’t tell us exactly what kind of rupture happens in these very deep earthquakes. The kind of simple cracking we see in surface quakes is forbidden by the physics down there. We think that “phase transformations” of minerals are involved, in which the atoms reconfigure themselves into a new crystalline arrangement better suited to the high-pressure environment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another paper in the same issue of \u003cem>Science \u003c/em>reported high-pressure experiments demonstrating just that in olivine, the most common mineral of the mantle. Squeezing things at high pressure is fairly easy in the lab, but squeezing a sample and deforming it at the same time at 1000°C takes our cleverest people and equipment. An international team led by Alexandre Schubnel of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris not only did that, but reproduced microscopic versions of deep earthquakes in 3-millimeter cylinders of olivine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_9040\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/microfaults.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9040\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9040\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/microfaults.png\" alt=\"Nanofaults in olivine\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Faults (thin gray lines) in olivine. White grains are enstatite; note that some are split and offset along the faults. Part of figure S4 of Schubnel et al., “Deep-focus earthquake analogs recorded at high pressure and temperature in the laboratory,” \u003cem>Science\u003c/em> vol. 341, pp. 1377-1380.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>X-ray analyses showed them that about 5 percent of the samples had undergone a phase transformation from the olivine molecular structure to the spinel structure—exactly what is called for in deep earthquakes. It looked like a very clean result: “No evidence of melting or amorphous material was found at any scale, implying that the phase transformation was essentially instantaneous during fault propagation.” They also detected sounds in the samples that correspond nicely with what we call earthquakes when they’re a million times larger.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When we seek to understand events deep in the mantle, techniques like those used in these two papers are all we have. It’s a marvel when the progress we make is so clear-cut.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Blue Oaks Shine New Light on California's Past Climate",
"headTitle": "Blue Oaks Shine New Light on California’s Past Climate | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Everyone knows about the giant sequoia, California’s best-known endemic species—one that occurs nowhere outside the state. Not so many know about the blue oak (\u003ci>Quercus douglasii\u003c/i>), but you see it whenever you leave the Central Valley in any direction. Blue oaks populate the dry hills all around the valley’s edge, starting as scattered specimens in the savanna and thickening with altitude into a proper forest. Higher up, they tend to give way to conifer forests. Their name comes from the bluish green of their leaves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8651\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoakleaves.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8651\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoakleaves.jpg\" alt=\"blue oak leaves\" width=\"600\" height=\"412\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8651\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">KQED Quest image\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Blue oaks don’t make good timber and they don’t interfere with cattle, so the blue oak habitats have been surprisingly little touched by Western civilization. And the trees can live much longer than we’ve given them credit for. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In fact,” says David Stahle, a tree-ring specialist at the University of Arkansas in a new paper on the blue oaks, “the remnant old-growth blue oak ecosystem may be one of the most extensive presettlement woodland cover types left in California.” \u003ca href=\"http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2013EI000518.1\">Stahle’s paper in the journal \u003ci>Earth Interactions\u003c/i>\u003c/a> describes a large set of tree-ring records from blue oak populations that document California climate back to the mid-1300s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8652\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoakmap.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8652\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoakmap.png\" alt=\"blue oak map\" width=\"600\" height=\"361\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8652\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From Stahle et al., “\u003ca href=\"http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2013EI000518.1\">The Ancient Blue Oak Woodlands of California: Longevity and Hydroclimatic History\u003c/a>,” \u003ci>Earth Interactions\u003c/i>, August 2013\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Blue oak is a tough, drought-resistant tree that can shed its leaves when necessary. It also grows very slowly and doesn’t reach much more than 50 feet in height. A waist-high seedling can be 40 years old; a modest, scraggly specimen may have taken centuries to mature. Stahle’s team found a tree growing near Coalinga with 459 annual rings—and heart rot that had erased its earliest years. (Living trees are studied by extracting pencil-sized cores from their trunks.) They found another one, dead since 1884, with 553 rings. While that’s far short of the millennium-scale lifespans of the redwood, sequoia and bristlecone pine, it puts blue oaks among the longest-lived hardwood trees (angiosperms).\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8653\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoak350.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8653\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoak350.jpg\" alt=\"old blue oak\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8653\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This blue oak in Sequoia National Park is 350 years old. From Stahle et al.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Blue oaks are sensitive to rainfall, putting on thick rings of wood in good years and thin ones, fractions of a millimeter thick, during droughts. Stahle’s team sampled over a thousand trees in 36 different blue oak populations (including one on Mount Diablo) to outline almost 700 years of rainfall in the Central Valley and Coast Range. The southernmost groves correlate well with Southern California rainfall. Analyzing separate rainfall records for northern and southern regions, the team documented periods when the large-scale weather patterns were shifted northward or southward. These in turn affect where \u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/2012/11/01/watching-the-atmospheric-rivers-flow/\">atmospheric rivers\u003c/a>, which dominate the winter rain totals, may strike coastal California. The north-south weather movements also affect water storage in Northern California, which supplies three-fourths of the water in the state’s aqueducts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Knowing rainfall, the researchers could also model streamflow in California’s major rivers, which in turn governs the amount of freshwater entering San Francisco Bay. By matching the blue oak record to almost 90 years of salinity measurements at Fort Point, in the Golden Gate, Stahle’s team modeled the Bay’s water back to the 1300s. They were able to show that human diversion of freshwater during the last century has made the Bay much saltier, such that its salinity levels during the drought years of 1976, 1977, 1988 and 1990 were the highest since 1332. Conversely, the El Niño floods of 1998 would have set a century-scale low in Bay salinity in the absence of human influences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8654\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoaksalinity.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8654\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoaksalinity.png\" alt=\"SF Bay salinity\" width=\"600\" height=\"225\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8654\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">San Francisco Bay salinity, modeled from the blue oak precipitation record. The red curve is the actual record in recent years, affected by water withdrawals. From Stahle et al.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Stahle’s team thinks there should be some living blue oaks older than 600 years, “and a very few select individuals might be over 700 years old.” If we can find those trees, we’ll have a lot more to learn from this remarkable species. Seven centuries of environmental change are a good baseline from which to assess our range of probable futures—our deep present—and give them some thought as we make long-term plans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8655\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 585px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoakcolor.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8655\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoakcolor.jpg\" alt=\"Blue oak fall color\" width=\"585\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8655\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Fall colors of blue oak in Briones Park. Photo courtesy \u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/miguelvieira/\">Miguel Vieira\u003c/a> of Flickr via Creative Commons license\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although state and national parks preserve excellent stands of blue oak forest (as does the Wildlands Conservancy’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.wildlandsconservancy.org/preserve_windwolves.html\">Wind Wolves Preserve\u003c/a> near Bakersfield), most of the ecosystem is on privately owned land. Preservation and good management of these lands may yield a continuing harvest of scientific data as well as the acorns that once sustained the native tribes.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Everyone knows about the giant sequoia, California’s best-known endemic species—one that occurs nowhere outside the state. Not so many know about the blue oak (\u003ci>Quercus douglasii\u003c/i>), but you see it whenever you leave the Central Valley in any direction. Blue oaks populate the dry hills all around the valley’s edge, starting as scattered specimens in the savanna and thickening with altitude into a proper forest. Higher up, they tend to give way to conifer forests. Their name comes from the bluish green of their leaves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8651\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoakleaves.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8651\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoakleaves.jpg\" alt=\"blue oak leaves\" width=\"600\" height=\"412\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8651\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">KQED Quest image\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Blue oaks don’t make good timber and they don’t interfere with cattle, so the blue oak habitats have been surprisingly little touched by Western civilization. And the trees can live much longer than we’ve given them credit for. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In fact,” says David Stahle, a tree-ring specialist at the University of Arkansas in a new paper on the blue oaks, “the remnant old-growth blue oak ecosystem may be one of the most extensive presettlement woodland cover types left in California.” \u003ca href=\"http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2013EI000518.1\">Stahle’s paper in the journal \u003ci>Earth Interactions\u003c/i>\u003c/a> describes a large set of tree-ring records from blue oak populations that document California climate back to the mid-1300s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8652\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoakmap.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8652\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoakmap.png\" alt=\"blue oak map\" width=\"600\" height=\"361\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8652\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From Stahle et al., “\u003ca href=\"http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2013EI000518.1\">The Ancient Blue Oak Woodlands of California: Longevity and Hydroclimatic History\u003c/a>,” \u003ci>Earth Interactions\u003c/i>, August 2013\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Blue oak is a tough, drought-resistant tree that can shed its leaves when necessary. It also grows very slowly and doesn’t reach much more than 50 feet in height. A waist-high seedling can be 40 years old; a modest, scraggly specimen may have taken centuries to mature. Stahle’s team found a tree growing near Coalinga with 459 annual rings—and heart rot that had erased its earliest years. (Living trees are studied by extracting pencil-sized cores from their trunks.) They found another one, dead since 1884, with 553 rings. While that’s far short of the millennium-scale lifespans of the redwood, sequoia and bristlecone pine, it puts blue oaks among the longest-lived hardwood trees (angiosperms).\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8653\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoak350.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8653\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoak350.jpg\" alt=\"old blue oak\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8653\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This blue oak in Sequoia National Park is 350 years old. From Stahle et al.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Blue oaks are sensitive to rainfall, putting on thick rings of wood in good years and thin ones, fractions of a millimeter thick, during droughts. Stahle’s team sampled over a thousand trees in 36 different blue oak populations (including one on Mount Diablo) to outline almost 700 years of rainfall in the Central Valley and Coast Range. The southernmost groves correlate well with Southern California rainfall. Analyzing separate rainfall records for northern and southern regions, the team documented periods when the large-scale weather patterns were shifted northward or southward. These in turn affect where \u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/2012/11/01/watching-the-atmospheric-rivers-flow/\">atmospheric rivers\u003c/a>, which dominate the winter rain totals, may strike coastal California. The north-south weather movements also affect water storage in Northern California, which supplies three-fourths of the water in the state’s aqueducts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Knowing rainfall, the researchers could also model streamflow in California’s major rivers, which in turn governs the amount of freshwater entering San Francisco Bay. By matching the blue oak record to almost 90 years of salinity measurements at Fort Point, in the Golden Gate, Stahle’s team modeled the Bay’s water back to the 1300s. They were able to show that human diversion of freshwater during the last century has made the Bay much saltier, such that its salinity levels during the drought years of 1976, 1977, 1988 and 1990 were the highest since 1332. Conversely, the El Niño floods of 1998 would have set a century-scale low in Bay salinity in the absence of human influences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8654\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoaksalinity.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8654\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoaksalinity.png\" alt=\"SF Bay salinity\" width=\"600\" height=\"225\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8654\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">San Francisco Bay salinity, modeled from the blue oak precipitation record. The red curve is the actual record in recent years, affected by water withdrawals. From Stahle et al.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Stahle’s team thinks there should be some living blue oaks older than 600 years, “and a very few select individuals might be over 700 years old.” If we can find those trees, we’ll have a lot more to learn from this remarkable species. Seven centuries of environmental change are a good baseline from which to assess our range of probable futures—our deep present—and give them some thought as we make long-term plans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8655\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 585px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoakcolor.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8655\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/blueoakcolor.jpg\" alt=\"Blue oak fall color\" width=\"585\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8655\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Fall colors of blue oak in Briones Park. Photo courtesy \u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/miguelvieira/\">Miguel Vieira\u003c/a> of Flickr via Creative Commons license\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although state and national parks preserve excellent stands of blue oak forest (as does the Wildlands Conservancy’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.wildlandsconservancy.org/preserve_windwolves.html\">Wind Wolves Preserve\u003c/a> near Bakersfield), most of the ecosystem is on privately owned land. Preservation and good management of these lands may yield a continuing harvest of scientific data as well as the acorns that once sustained the native tribes.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "How California's Warping Microplate Makes Its Faults Creep",
"headTitle": "How California’s Warping Microplate Makes Its Faults Creep | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Last week I gave a walking tour of the Hayward fault along the Oakland-Berkeley border. Among other things, I talked about the fault’s peculiar behavior called aseismic creep, in which the two sides of the fault move slowly past each other at just a few millimeters per year without the help of earthquakes. I pointed out places where creep has been gently distorting the streets. I explained that creep doesn’t remove much earthquake energy because it only affects shallow parts of the fault that can’t store much energy anyway. But I couldn’t say much more about it because geologists studying the creep problem have lots of questions, several hypotheses, and no answers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8037\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/stonewallfault.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8037\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8037\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/stonewallfault.jpg\" alt=\"Hayward fault creep\" width=\"600\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The creeping Hayward fault crosses Oakland’s Stonewall Road in 2001. All of this has since been rebuilt. Photo by Andrew Alden\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Just days later, \u003ca href=\"http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/41/9/\">the September issue of the journal \u003cem>Geology\u003c/em>\u003c/a> came out with a paper that makes an intriguing connection between our creeping faults and slow activity on the other side of the Sierra Nevada microplate, where the Earth’s outer shell is secretly splitting apart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(That’s right: The heart of California—the Central Valley and the mountains that ring it—is a separate tectonic plate, bounded by fault zones all the way around. The Sierra Nevada microplate rotates slightly and moves northwest at a few millimeters per year relative to the rest of the North America plate. California really \u003cem>is\u003c/em> different from its neighbors.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fault creep is quite uncommon in general, but a big central section of the San Andreas fault complex is creeping today while on either side the fault is locked, building up energy for large earthquakes like the 1906 quake in Northern California and the 1857 Fort Tejon quake in Southern California. The so-called creeping section runs from the village of Parkfield east of Paso Robles up to San Juan Bautista. Near there the Calaveras fault splits off from the San Andreas, and in turn the Hayward fault splits off from the Calaveras—and both of those faults also creep. See them shown in blue in this figure from the \u003cem>Geology\u003c/em> paper. The authors are Laetitia Le Pourhiet, a French geophysicist, and Jason Saleeby, a geologist at Caltech’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.tectonics.caltech.edu/research/\">Tectonics Observatory\u003c/a> who has studied the southern Sierra Nevada for decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8033\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 568px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/fig1pourhietsaleeby.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8033\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8033\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/fig1pourhietsaleeby.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 1 Le Pourhiet-Saleeby paper\" width=\"568\" height=\"566\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 1 of Le Pourhiet and Saleeby, “\u003ca href=\"http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/41/9/999.abstract\">Lithospheric convective instability could induce creep along part of the San Andreas fault\u003c/a>,” \u003cem>Geology\u003c/em> v. 41, p. 999-1002 (Sept. 2013). Stars mark notable earthquakes in (north to south) 1906, 1989, 1983, 2004 and 1857.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>One of Saleeby’s most interesting lines of research is exploring how the dense rocky root of the southern Sierra broke off (delaminated) and sank into the hotter, softer mantle beneath to form a “lithospheric drip” starting about 4 million years ago. On the east side of the Sierra, the mountains responded by springing upward to create the dramatic eastern face that includes Mount Whitney, highest peak in the 48 states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8034\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/southernsierra.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8034\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8034\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/southernsierra.jpg\" alt=\"Southern Sierra Nevada\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">East face of the southern Sierra Nevada at Owens Lake. Photo courtesy \u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthigh/\">Matthew Lee High\u003c/a> of Flickr via Creative Commons license\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The “Big Drip”, if I may call it that, is bending and twisting the rest of our microplate. On its west side, the drip is still attached and pulling down on the crust. The result is that the southern Great Valley is at its widest and deepest there, in the Tulare geologic basin. If you think of the Earth’s crust across central California as an air mattress floating in a pool, imagine a swimmer grabbing it in the middle from below and pulling down. The east end (the Sierra) bends upward and the middle (the Tulare basin) bends down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What happens farther west? Le Pourhiet did the computer modeling to show that the west side of the microplate arches upward by a hundred feet or so. That side is pinned against the San Andreas fault so it can’t simply break and spring upward like the eastern Sierra, which is being pulled away from Nevada.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8035\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 546px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/fig3pourhietsaleeby.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8035\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8035\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/fig3pourhietsaleeby.png\" alt=\"Sierra Nevada microplate warpage\" width=\"546\" height=\"450\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Part of Figure 3 of the \u003cem>Geology\u003c/em> paper; colors show the calculated vertical movements in response to the Big Drip.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When the authors fed that result into a model of the San Andreas fault’s physics, the model accounted for the size and nature of the creeping section. There, most of the fault between the surface and its base at around 15 kilometers depth turns out weak and slippery, and only a narrow band of rock in the middle of that range has enough friction to gather a lot of strain energy. For the creeping section the model suggests a pattern of earthquakes no bigger than magnitude 6 or so, plus lots of creep. (In this picture the Bay Area is near the edge of that pattern, so while our faults creep they still are considered able to clobber us with magnitude-7 events.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So is any of this a scientific fact? Not yet; it’s just another good hypothesis that fits a variety of data but needs refinement. Scientific consensus is when everyone accepts a good hypothesis and moves ahead because they’ve run out of good counterarguments. We definitely haven’t reached that point for the San Andreas fault system. In the meantime, I can show you examples of Hayward fault creep \u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/2011/05/05/geological-outings-around-the-bay-a-visit-to-the-hayward-fault/\">in Hayward\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/2013/04/18/gallegos-winery-and-the-hayward-fault/\">in Fremont\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/2011/10/06/geological-outings-around-the-bay-point-pinole-and-the-hayward-fault/\">in Pinole\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "A tectonic \"Big Drip\" beneath the southern Sierra Nevada is connected to the creeping faults of Northern California in a new paper published in \u003ci>Geology\u003c/i>.",
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"description": "A tectonic "Big Drip" beneath the southern Sierra Nevada is connected to the creeping faults of Northern California in a new paper published in Geology.",
"title": "How California's Warping Microplate Makes Its Faults Creep | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Last week I gave a walking tour of the Hayward fault along the Oakland-Berkeley border. Among other things, I talked about the fault’s peculiar behavior called aseismic creep, in which the two sides of the fault move slowly past each other at just a few millimeters per year without the help of earthquakes. I pointed out places where creep has been gently distorting the streets. I explained that creep doesn’t remove much earthquake energy because it only affects shallow parts of the fault that can’t store much energy anyway. But I couldn’t say much more about it because geologists studying the creep problem have lots of questions, several hypotheses, and no answers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8037\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/stonewallfault.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8037\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8037\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/stonewallfault.jpg\" alt=\"Hayward fault creep\" width=\"600\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The creeping Hayward fault crosses Oakland’s Stonewall Road in 2001. All of this has since been rebuilt. Photo by Andrew Alden\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Just days later, \u003ca href=\"http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/41/9/\">the September issue of the journal \u003cem>Geology\u003c/em>\u003c/a> came out with a paper that makes an intriguing connection between our creeping faults and slow activity on the other side of the Sierra Nevada microplate, where the Earth’s outer shell is secretly splitting apart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(That’s right: The heart of California—the Central Valley and the mountains that ring it—is a separate tectonic plate, bounded by fault zones all the way around. The Sierra Nevada microplate rotates slightly and moves northwest at a few millimeters per year relative to the rest of the North America plate. California really \u003cem>is\u003c/em> different from its neighbors.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fault creep is quite uncommon in general, but a big central section of the San Andreas fault complex is creeping today while on either side the fault is locked, building up energy for large earthquakes like the 1906 quake in Northern California and the 1857 Fort Tejon quake in Southern California. The so-called creeping section runs from the village of Parkfield east of Paso Robles up to San Juan Bautista. Near there the Calaveras fault splits off from the San Andreas, and in turn the Hayward fault splits off from the Calaveras—and both of those faults also creep. See them shown in blue in this figure from the \u003cem>Geology\u003c/em> paper. The authors are Laetitia Le Pourhiet, a French geophysicist, and Jason Saleeby, a geologist at Caltech’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.tectonics.caltech.edu/research/\">Tectonics Observatory\u003c/a> who has studied the southern Sierra Nevada for decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8033\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 568px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/fig1pourhietsaleeby.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8033\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8033\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/fig1pourhietsaleeby.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 1 Le Pourhiet-Saleeby paper\" width=\"568\" height=\"566\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 1 of Le Pourhiet and Saleeby, “\u003ca href=\"http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/41/9/999.abstract\">Lithospheric convective instability could induce creep along part of the San Andreas fault\u003c/a>,” \u003cem>Geology\u003c/em> v. 41, p. 999-1002 (Sept. 2013). Stars mark notable earthquakes in (north to south) 1906, 1989, 1983, 2004 and 1857.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>One of Saleeby’s most interesting lines of research is exploring how the dense rocky root of the southern Sierra broke off (delaminated) and sank into the hotter, softer mantle beneath to form a “lithospheric drip” starting about 4 million years ago. On the east side of the Sierra, the mountains responded by springing upward to create the dramatic eastern face that includes Mount Whitney, highest peak in the 48 states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8034\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/southernsierra.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8034\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8034\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/southernsierra.jpg\" alt=\"Southern Sierra Nevada\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">East face of the southern Sierra Nevada at Owens Lake. Photo courtesy \u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthigh/\">Matthew Lee High\u003c/a> of Flickr via Creative Commons license\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The “Big Drip”, if I may call it that, is bending and twisting the rest of our microplate. On its west side, the drip is still attached and pulling down on the crust. The result is that the southern Great Valley is at its widest and deepest there, in the Tulare geologic basin. If you think of the Earth’s crust across central California as an air mattress floating in a pool, imagine a swimmer grabbing it in the middle from below and pulling down. The east end (the Sierra) bends upward and the middle (the Tulare basin) bends down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What happens farther west? Le Pourhiet did the computer modeling to show that the west side of the microplate arches upward by a hundred feet or so. That side is pinned against the San Andreas fault so it can’t simply break and spring upward like the eastern Sierra, which is being pulled away from Nevada.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_8035\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 546px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/fig3pourhietsaleeby.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8035\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8035\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/09/fig3pourhietsaleeby.png\" alt=\"Sierra Nevada microplate warpage\" width=\"546\" height=\"450\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Part of Figure 3 of the \u003cem>Geology\u003c/em> paper; colors show the calculated vertical movements in response to the Big Drip.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When the authors fed that result into a model of the San Andreas fault’s physics, the model accounted for the size and nature of the creeping section. There, most of the fault between the surface and its base at around 15 kilometers depth turns out weak and slippery, and only a narrow band of rock in the middle of that range has enough friction to gather a lot of strain energy. For the creeping section the model suggests a pattern of earthquakes no bigger than magnitude 6 or so, plus lots of creep. (In this picture the Bay Area is near the edge of that pattern, so while our faults creep they still are considered able to clobber us with magnitude-7 events.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So is any of this a scientific fact? Not yet; it’s just another good hypothesis that fits a variety of data but needs refinement. Scientific consensus is when everyone accepts a good hypothesis and moves ahead because they’ve run out of good counterarguments. We definitely haven’t reached that point for the San Andreas fault system. In the meantime, I can show you examples of Hayward fault creep \u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/2011/05/05/geological-outings-around-the-bay-a-visit-to-the-hayward-fault/\">in Hayward\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/2013/04/18/gallegos-winery-and-the-hayward-fault/\">in Fremont\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/2011/10/06/geological-outings-around-the-bay-point-pinole-and-the-hayward-fault/\">in Pinole\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "A Lifetime Later, a New Plan to Drill Down to the Earth's Mantle",
"headTitle": "A Lifetime Later, a New Plan to Drill Down to the Earth’s Mantle | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>The long-running program in charge of drilling rock cores from the ocean floor has set a new goal that will thrill those of us who remember all of The Sixties. The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) intends to carry out a task last tried in 1961: drilling the first hole through the Earth’s crust, past the Mohorovicic Discontinuity at its base (the Moho) and into the rocks of the Earth’s mantle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The U.S. did a lot of pioneering things in the early 1960s. For instance, we launched our first astronauts into space in 1961 and set foot on the Moon eight years later. That turned out a great success. Another was sending two men \u003ca href=\"http://www.hnsa.org/ships/trieste.htm\">in a special submarine\u003c/a> down to the deepest spot in the ocean, in 1960. That feat wasn’t repeated \u003ca href=\"http://deepseachallenge.com/the-sub/then-and-now/\">until just last year\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another effort of the time was \u003ca href=\"http://www.nationalacademies.org/mohole.html\">Project Mohole\u003c/a>, an attempt to drill a hole through the Moho by picking an offshore spot where the crust is thin. In 1961, an experimental ship sent a drill string down through nearly 12,000 feet of seawater and into the seafloor near Guadalupe Island, west of Baja California. Several holes were drilled, the deepest more than 600 feet long. It penetrated completely through the ancient mud at the bottom of the sea and recovered a few feet of core from the crustal rock beneath, but that proof-of-concept exercise was as far as Project Mohole ever got.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, drillers of the offshore oil industry and the IODP (which started as the Deep Sea Drilling Project in the late 1960s) have advanced the art well past the bleeding-edge techniques used in Project Mohole. And the long-running research project is now thoroughly international. Although deep-sea drilling is still a challenge, the world scientific community now has decades of experience and is ready to try again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Let me outline the scientific problem. Earth consists of a big core of molten iron and the mantle, which is a thick blanket of rock that wraps around it.. Between them they amount to 99 percent of the planet and the Earth’s crust—continents, ocean floors and everything else—is like a coat of tarnish on the top. The crust is an extract of the mantle: wherever plate tectonics releases enough pressure on the mantle it starts to melt. That fraction of melt, enriched in a few key elements (silicon, oxygen, aluminum, sodium and calcium), has evolved over the age of the Earth into the land we know with its thick, high-riding continents and low-riding seafloor. The oceans are where the crust is thinnest, as thin as a few kilometers, whereas drilling through the continents is hopeless because they’re tens of kilometers thick. Here’s a diagram showing the structure of the oceanic crust as we understand it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_7395\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/crustmodel.gif\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-7395\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7395\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/crustmodel.gif\" alt=\"oceanic crust model\" width=\"600\" height=\"294\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Diagram and photos by Andrew Alden\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At the bottom of the ocean we first find mud, which changes to rock as we drill deeper. Below it is lava in various forms: layers of pillow-shaped bodies on top where the lava erupted into ice-cold seawater; farther down are the vertical cracks, which once were conduits filled with hot magma, but are now frozen basalt of the same composition as the pillows. Deeper still is the original mantle melt, which cooled very slowly to form the coarse-grained rock gabbro. And below the Moho is the dark, heavy mantle rock that gave rise to the gabbro and basalt: peridotite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How certain is all this? Not as certain as we’d like. We’ve mapped the ocean’s crust using seismic waves in a supersized version of sonar and see three layers with different physical properties above the Moho (which Andrija Mohorovicic first described in 1909, also using seismic evidence). We know directly, from drilling, that the top layer is sediment and that Layer 2 is basalt lava. Since Project Mohole, the deepest seafloor drilling has gone about a mile farther to reach the top of Layer 3, which as expected is gabbro.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_7399\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/gabbro.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-7399\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7399\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/gabbro.jpg\" alt=\"gabbro\" width=\"500\" height=\"352\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gabbroic rock from the Sierra Nevada\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The rest of the picture we have deduced from rocks on land—large packages of marine rocks called \u003ca href=\"http://geology.about.com/od/platetectonics/a/ophiolite.htm\">ophiolites\u003c/a>—which we interpret as chunks of oceanic crust that accidents of plate tectonics pushed onto the continents. Ophiolites have the same three layers in the same vertical order, with peridotite at the bottom representing ancient mantle rocks. We have reinforcing evidence from broken bits of mantle rock, called xenoliths, that are sometimes carried to the surface in lava. However, ophiolites and xenoliths are altered from their tectonic manhandling, and they aren’t guaranteed to be typical of the mantle, either.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_7400\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/mantlerock.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-7400\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7400\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/mantlerock.jpg\" alt=\"mantle rock\" width=\"500\" height=\"434\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Peridotite from the Klamath Mountains\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The problem is that our picture is based on indirect and imperfect evidence: seismic waves and geologic analogy. To assess that evidence, we could really use a few pristine samples of the mantle. This is the same problem we had with the moon in 1961. We could do all sorts of observations from Earth and make some tentative conclusions about the moon’s history and origin. We could even guess that some of the meteorites in our collections were from the moon. But until humans and robots succeeded in collecting rocks on the moon, as American and Soviet missions did between 1969 and 1976, lunar science was badly handicapped. And so today is our understanding of the deep Earth. And without a good understanding of the mantle, we can’t really understand the crust.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_7401\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/chikyu.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-7401\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7401\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/chikyu.jpg\" alt=\"Chikyu\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Courtesy IODP\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With \u003ca href=\"http://www.jamstec.go.jp/chikyu/eng/CHIKYU/\">the Japanese research vessel \u003cem>Chikyu\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, we finally have an instrument capable of reaching the mantle. The location is still to be chosen, but the prime candidate is the original Mohole site off Guadalupe Island. In the last few years, \u003cem>Chikyu\u003c/em> has carried out groundbreaking work and is ready for the task ahead. Along the way, drillers hope to set another mark by drilling beyond the depth of all life. Even our deepest samples from below the seafloor, even in solid rock, contain living microorganisms—just a few, but not none. The extent of life on Earth is still just as open a question as the nature of the mantle. These and other goals are laid out in the \u003ca href=\"http://www.iodp.org/science-plan-for-2013-2023\">science plan for 2013–2023\u003c/a>, a period in which the IODP will take on a new name: the International Ocean Discovery Program.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The long-running program in charge of drilling rock cores from the ocean floor has set a new goal that will thrill those of us who remember all of The Sixties. The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) intends to carry out a task last tried in 1961: drilling the first hole through the Earth’s crust, past the Mohorovicic Discontinuity at its base (the Moho) and into the rocks of the Earth’s mantle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The U.S. did a lot of pioneering things in the early 1960s. For instance, we launched our first astronauts into space in 1961 and set foot on the Moon eight years later. That turned out a great success. Another was sending two men \u003ca href=\"http://www.hnsa.org/ships/trieste.htm\">in a special submarine\u003c/a> down to the deepest spot in the ocean, in 1960. That feat wasn’t repeated \u003ca href=\"http://deepseachallenge.com/the-sub/then-and-now/\">until just last year\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another effort of the time was \u003ca href=\"http://www.nationalacademies.org/mohole.html\">Project Mohole\u003c/a>, an attempt to drill a hole through the Moho by picking an offshore spot where the crust is thin. In 1961, an experimental ship sent a drill string down through nearly 12,000 feet of seawater and into the seafloor near Guadalupe Island, west of Baja California. Several holes were drilled, the deepest more than 600 feet long. It penetrated completely through the ancient mud at the bottom of the sea and recovered a few feet of core from the crustal rock beneath, but that proof-of-concept exercise was as far as Project Mohole ever got.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, drillers of the offshore oil industry and the IODP (which started as the Deep Sea Drilling Project in the late 1960s) have advanced the art well past the bleeding-edge techniques used in Project Mohole. And the long-running research project is now thoroughly international. Although deep-sea drilling is still a challenge, the world scientific community now has decades of experience and is ready to try again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Let me outline the scientific problem. Earth consists of a big core of molten iron and the mantle, which is a thick blanket of rock that wraps around it.. Between them they amount to 99 percent of the planet and the Earth’s crust—continents, ocean floors and everything else—is like a coat of tarnish on the top. The crust is an extract of the mantle: wherever plate tectonics releases enough pressure on the mantle it starts to melt. That fraction of melt, enriched in a few key elements (silicon, oxygen, aluminum, sodium and calcium), has evolved over the age of the Earth into the land we know with its thick, high-riding continents and low-riding seafloor. The oceans are where the crust is thinnest, as thin as a few kilometers, whereas drilling through the continents is hopeless because they’re tens of kilometers thick. Here’s a diagram showing the structure of the oceanic crust as we understand it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_7395\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/crustmodel.gif\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-7395\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7395\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/crustmodel.gif\" alt=\"oceanic crust model\" width=\"600\" height=\"294\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Diagram and photos by Andrew Alden\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At the bottom of the ocean we first find mud, which changes to rock as we drill deeper. Below it is lava in various forms: layers of pillow-shaped bodies on top where the lava erupted into ice-cold seawater; farther down are the vertical cracks, which once were conduits filled with hot magma, but are now frozen basalt of the same composition as the pillows. Deeper still is the original mantle melt, which cooled very slowly to form the coarse-grained rock gabbro. And below the Moho is the dark, heavy mantle rock that gave rise to the gabbro and basalt: peridotite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How certain is all this? Not as certain as we’d like. We’ve mapped the ocean’s crust using seismic waves in a supersized version of sonar and see three layers with different physical properties above the Moho (which Andrija Mohorovicic first described in 1909, also using seismic evidence). We know directly, from drilling, that the top layer is sediment and that Layer 2 is basalt lava. Since Project Mohole, the deepest seafloor drilling has gone about a mile farther to reach the top of Layer 3, which as expected is gabbro.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_7399\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/gabbro.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-7399\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7399\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/gabbro.jpg\" alt=\"gabbro\" width=\"500\" height=\"352\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gabbroic rock from the Sierra Nevada\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The rest of the picture we have deduced from rocks on land—large packages of marine rocks called \u003ca href=\"http://geology.about.com/od/platetectonics/a/ophiolite.htm\">ophiolites\u003c/a>—which we interpret as chunks of oceanic crust that accidents of plate tectonics pushed onto the continents. Ophiolites have the same three layers in the same vertical order, with peridotite at the bottom representing ancient mantle rocks. We have reinforcing evidence from broken bits of mantle rock, called xenoliths, that are sometimes carried to the surface in lava. However, ophiolites and xenoliths are altered from their tectonic manhandling, and they aren’t guaranteed to be typical of the mantle, either.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_7400\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/mantlerock.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-7400\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7400\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/mantlerock.jpg\" alt=\"mantle rock\" width=\"500\" height=\"434\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Peridotite from the Klamath Mountains\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The problem is that our picture is based on indirect and imperfect evidence: seismic waves and geologic analogy. To assess that evidence, we could really use a few pristine samples of the mantle. This is the same problem we had with the moon in 1961. We could do all sorts of observations from Earth and make some tentative conclusions about the moon’s history and origin. We could even guess that some of the meteorites in our collections were from the moon. But until humans and robots succeeded in collecting rocks on the moon, as American and Soviet missions did between 1969 and 1976, lunar science was badly handicapped. And so today is our understanding of the deep Earth. And without a good understanding of the mantle, we can’t really understand the crust.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_7401\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/chikyu.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-7401\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7401\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/chikyu.jpg\" alt=\"Chikyu\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Courtesy IODP\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With \u003ca href=\"http://www.jamstec.go.jp/chikyu/eng/CHIKYU/\">the Japanese research vessel \u003cem>Chikyu\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, we finally have an instrument capable of reaching the mantle. The location is still to be chosen, but the prime candidate is the original Mohole site off Guadalupe Island. In the last few years, \u003cem>Chikyu\u003c/em> has carried out groundbreaking work and is ready for the task ahead. Along the way, drillers hope to set another mark by drilling beyond the depth of all life. Even our deepest samples from below the seafloor, even in solid rock, contain living microorganisms—just a few, but not none. The extent of life on Earth is still just as open a question as the nature of the mantle. These and other goals are laid out in the \u003ca href=\"http://www.iodp.org/science-plan-for-2013-2023\">science plan for 2013–2023\u003c/a>, a period in which the IODP will take on a new name: the International Ocean Discovery Program.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Rare Meteorite Lands Permanently at UC Davis",
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"content": "\u003cp>A chunk of a rare meteorite is landing permanently at University of California, Davis. The university just acquired a piece of \u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/2012/12/20/stardust-and-sunbreath-in-the-sutters-mill-meteorite/\">the rock\u003c/a>, which fell in Northern California last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_7357\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 1280px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/meteorite-LindaWelzenbach_Smithsonian-640x360.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/meteorite-LindaWelzenbach_Smithsonian-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"The main mass of the rare Sutter's Mill meteorite before it was divided up between five scientific institutions. (Linda Welzenbach/Smithsonian Institution)\" width=\"1280\" height=\"720\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7357\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The main mass of the rare Sutter’s Mill meteorite before it was divided up between five scientific institutions. (Linda Welzenbach/Smithsonian Institution)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Before the meteorite slammed into Earth it had been minding its own business in the solar system for more than 4.5 billion years. The meteorite’s age makes it rare and valuable. It contains dust from ancient stars that exploded — the same stuff that eventually formed our solar system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The reason that we’re excited about this meteorite is, [it] witnessed the beginning of the solar system,” said \u003ca href=\"http://geology.ucdavis.edu/people/faculty/yin.php\">Qing-Zhu Yin\u003c/a>, a geologist who specializes in meteorites at UC Davis. “If we want to unlock the secret of what happened 4 1/2 billion years ago leading to the formation of the solar system, this was a bystander from that point.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_7353\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1280px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/meteorite-1280-640x360.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7353 \" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/meteorite-1280-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"UC Davis geology professor Qing-Zhu Yin holds a fragment of the Sutter's Mill meteorite, a different piece than the one UC Davis just acquired. (Gregory Urquiaga/UC Davis)\" width=\"1280\" height=\"720\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">UC Davis geology professor Qing-Zhu Yin holds a fragment of the Sutter’s Mill meteorite, a different piece than the one UC Davis just acquired. (Gregory Urquiaga/UC Davis)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When the meteorite landed near Sutter’s Mill in April of last year, Yin and his students went to look for pieces of it. However, they didn’t find the largest piece until someone emailed Yin after attending a public lecture. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When I saw it, [I thought] this is it,” Qin said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This piece of the meteorite is being divided between five scientific institutions. Yin says Davis’s piece may be put on display in the future. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>You can see renderings of the meteorite on \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/user/YinLabatUCDavis?feature=watch\">YouTube\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "UC Davis is acquiring a chunk of meteorite that landed in Northern California last year. The meteorite's age makes it rare and valuable. It contains dust from ancient stars that exploded, the same stuff that eventually formed our solar system.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A chunk of a rare meteorite is landing permanently at University of California, Davis. The university just acquired a piece of \u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/2012/12/20/stardust-and-sunbreath-in-the-sutters-mill-meteorite/\">the rock\u003c/a>, which fell in Northern California last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_7357\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 1280px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/meteorite-LindaWelzenbach_Smithsonian-640x360.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/meteorite-LindaWelzenbach_Smithsonian-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"The main mass of the rare Sutter's Mill meteorite before it was divided up between five scientific institutions. (Linda Welzenbach/Smithsonian Institution)\" width=\"1280\" height=\"720\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7357\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The main mass of the rare Sutter’s Mill meteorite before it was divided up between five scientific institutions. (Linda Welzenbach/Smithsonian Institution)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Before the meteorite slammed into Earth it had been minding its own business in the solar system for more than 4.5 billion years. The meteorite’s age makes it rare and valuable. It contains dust from ancient stars that exploded — the same stuff that eventually formed our solar system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The reason that we’re excited about this meteorite is, [it] witnessed the beginning of the solar system,” said \u003ca href=\"http://geology.ucdavis.edu/people/faculty/yin.php\">Qing-Zhu Yin\u003c/a>, a geologist who specializes in meteorites at UC Davis. “If we want to unlock the secret of what happened 4 1/2 billion years ago leading to the formation of the solar system, this was a bystander from that point.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_7353\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1280px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/meteorite-1280-640x360.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7353 \" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/meteorite-1280-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"UC Davis geology professor Qing-Zhu Yin holds a fragment of the Sutter's Mill meteorite, a different piece than the one UC Davis just acquired. (Gregory Urquiaga/UC Davis)\" width=\"1280\" height=\"720\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">UC Davis geology professor Qing-Zhu Yin holds a fragment of the Sutter’s Mill meteorite, a different piece than the one UC Davis just acquired. (Gregory Urquiaga/UC Davis)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When the meteorite landed near Sutter’s Mill in April of last year, Yin and his students went to look for pieces of it. However, they didn’t find the largest piece until someone emailed Yin after attending a public lecture. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When I saw it, [I thought] this is it,” Qin said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This piece of the meteorite is being divided between five scientific institutions. Yin says Davis’s piece may be put on display in the future. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>You can see renderings of the meteorite on \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/user/YinLabatUCDavis?feature=watch\">YouTube\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Take a Hike at Watershed Lands in the Bay Area",
"headTitle": "Take a Hike at Watershed Lands in the Bay Area | KQED",
"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_7165\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/ebmudview.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-7165\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/ebmudview.jpg\" alt=\"watershed land\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7165\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The high Berkeley Hills seen from East Bay MUD watershed lands in the Siesta Valley, Orinda. Photo by Andrew Alden\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Lately I’ve been enjoying the special qualities of my local watershed lands. They’re interesting because even though our watersheds aren’t wildernesses, they have many wilderness qualities. Watershed land is put to work in the way that land works best: as a combination of soil and ecosystems that collects rain and preserves it as high-quality water. If humans have to make land useful—and no question about it, we must so we can stay alive and thriving—then using it to turn rain into clean drinking water instead of floods is a scheme that ranks right up there with spinning straw into gold. It’s like keeping part of the land certified-organic, free of pesticides and other pollution. Most Bay Area water agencies allow us carefully limited access to enjoy these clean working spaces for what they are.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our watersheds may look pristine, but they’re carefully managed. The hillsides are mowed, grazed and burned under careful monitoring. The ecosystem of the 19th century, with its elk herds and grizzlies and wolves, is long gone. But the sight of grassy slopes with their wooded creases in rain and sun remains a year-round feast for the eyes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reservoirs themselves are totally artificial, of course; they’re more like tanks than lakes. They have steep and jagged shorelines, and their water levels swing wildly over the course of the year. Many reservoirs also serve as aquariums, regularly stocked with sport fish that anglers pay to come and catch. Reservoir water still needs to be processed, in tanks, with chemicals. But the sight of water reacting to wind is still an inexhaustible blessing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Watershed lands aren’t destinations, like state or national parks. Their natural features aren’t unusual, and to me that’s a key part of their charm: they are indigenous landscapes that help me paint a mental picture of the original land that underlies everything we’ve built on top of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s a quick look at the possibilities, from north to south. I’m focusing mainly on hiking trails, but boating and horseback riding are other common activities on watershed lands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://www.scwa.ca.gov/\">Sonoma County Water Agency\u003c/a> has several reservoirs in the Russian River watershed, but only \u003ca href=\"http://parks.sonomacounty.ca.gov/Get_Outdoors/Parks/Spring_Lake_Regional_Park.aspx\">Spring Lake Park\u003c/a>, in Santa Rosa, welcomes visitors. Typical of water district facilities, it forbids gasoline-fueled boats and swimmers from the water.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://marinwater.org/\">Marin Municipal Water District\u003c/a> has a major center of recreation in its \u003ca href=\"http://marinwater.org/controller?action=menuclick&id=586\">Mount Tamalpais watershed lands\u003c/a>, with 130 miles of trails and unpaved roads serving hikers, equestrians and bicyclists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://www.ccwater.com/\">Contra Costa Water District\u003c/a> operates its \u003ca href=\"http://www.ccwater.com/losvaqueros/recreation.asp\">Los Vaqueros Reservoir\u003c/a>, east of Mount Diablo, as an intensive recreation resource including more than 50 miles of trails.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://sfwater.org/\">San Francisco Public Utilities Commission\u003c/a> manages the watershed around its San Mateo Peninsula reservoirs, the ones you see west of I-280. Hikers can visit this land \u003ca href=\"http://sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=147\">on the Fifield-Cahill Ridge Trail\u003c/a> only as part of a supervised hike, but it’s a beauty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://www.ebmud.com/\">East Bay Municipal Utility District\u003c/a> manages big chunks of land around its reservoirs behind the East Bay hills. These include \u003ca href=\"http://www.ebmud.com/recreation/east-bay-trails\">80 miles of trails\u003c/a>, accessible with a very inexpensive pass. It also has watershed land \u003ca href=\"http://www.ebmud.com/recreation/sierra-foothills-trails\">in the Sierra foothills\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://www.acwd.org/\">Alameda County Water District\u003c/a>, serving the Fremont area, has no reservoirs because its local supply is the \u003ca href=\"http://www.acwd.org/index.aspx?NID=380\">groundwater of the Nile Cone\u003c/a>. But it has a unique “watershed” property where 19th-century gravel quarries on the Cone now serve as recharge ponds, and within the last 20 years the area has been developed as \u003ca href=\"http://www.ebparks.org/Page138.aspx\">Quarry Lakes Regional Recreation Area\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, the \u003ca href=\"http://www.valleywater.org/\">Santa Clara Valley Water District\u003c/a> has several reservoirs in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, access to which is managed by the county and San Jose city governments. It also has 70 miles of trails along the creeks and holding ponds of the valley floor. \u003ca href=\"http://www.valleywater.org/services/TrailMapLinks.aspx\">Find maps on this page.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Watershed lands aren’t destinations, like state or national parks. Their natural features aren’t unusual, and to me that’s a key part of their charm.",
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"title": "Take a Hike at Watershed Lands in the Bay Area | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_7165\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/ebmudview.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-7165\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/ebmudview.jpg\" alt=\"watershed land\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7165\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The high Berkeley Hills seen from East Bay MUD watershed lands in the Siesta Valley, Orinda. Photo by Andrew Alden\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Lately I’ve been enjoying the special qualities of my local watershed lands. They’re interesting because even though our watersheds aren’t wildernesses, they have many wilderness qualities. Watershed land is put to work in the way that land works best: as a combination of soil and ecosystems that collects rain and preserves it as high-quality water. If humans have to make land useful—and no question about it, we must so we can stay alive and thriving—then using it to turn rain into clean drinking water instead of floods is a scheme that ranks right up there with spinning straw into gold. It’s like keeping part of the land certified-organic, free of pesticides and other pollution. Most Bay Area water agencies allow us carefully limited access to enjoy these clean working spaces for what they are.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our watersheds may look pristine, but they’re carefully managed. The hillsides are mowed, grazed and burned under careful monitoring. The ecosystem of the 19th century, with its elk herds and grizzlies and wolves, is long gone. But the sight of grassy slopes with their wooded creases in rain and sun remains a year-round feast for the eyes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reservoirs themselves are totally artificial, of course; they’re more like tanks than lakes. They have steep and jagged shorelines, and their water levels swing wildly over the course of the year. Many reservoirs also serve as aquariums, regularly stocked with sport fish that anglers pay to come and catch. Reservoir water still needs to be processed, in tanks, with chemicals. But the sight of water reacting to wind is still an inexhaustible blessing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Watershed lands aren’t destinations, like state or national parks. Their natural features aren’t unusual, and to me that’s a key part of their charm: they are indigenous landscapes that help me paint a mental picture of the original land that underlies everything we’ve built on top of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s a quick look at the possibilities, from north to south. I’m focusing mainly on hiking trails, but boating and horseback riding are other common activities on watershed lands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://www.scwa.ca.gov/\">Sonoma County Water Agency\u003c/a> has several reservoirs in the Russian River watershed, but only \u003ca href=\"http://parks.sonomacounty.ca.gov/Get_Outdoors/Parks/Spring_Lake_Regional_Park.aspx\">Spring Lake Park\u003c/a>, in Santa Rosa, welcomes visitors. Typical of water district facilities, it forbids gasoline-fueled boats and swimmers from the water.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://marinwater.org/\">Marin Municipal Water District\u003c/a> has a major center of recreation in its \u003ca href=\"http://marinwater.org/controller?action=menuclick&id=586\">Mount Tamalpais watershed lands\u003c/a>, with 130 miles of trails and unpaved roads serving hikers, equestrians and bicyclists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://www.ccwater.com/\">Contra Costa Water District\u003c/a> operates its \u003ca href=\"http://www.ccwater.com/losvaqueros/recreation.asp\">Los Vaqueros Reservoir\u003c/a>, east of Mount Diablo, as an intensive recreation resource including more than 50 miles of trails.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://sfwater.org/\">San Francisco Public Utilities Commission\u003c/a> manages the watershed around its San Mateo Peninsula reservoirs, the ones you see west of I-280. Hikers can visit this land \u003ca href=\"http://sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=147\">on the Fifield-Cahill Ridge Trail\u003c/a> only as part of a supervised hike, but it’s a beauty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://www.ebmud.com/\">East Bay Municipal Utility District\u003c/a> manages big chunks of land around its reservoirs behind the East Bay hills. These include \u003ca href=\"http://www.ebmud.com/recreation/east-bay-trails\">80 miles of trails\u003c/a>, accessible with a very inexpensive pass. It also has watershed land \u003ca href=\"http://www.ebmud.com/recreation/sierra-foothills-trails\">in the Sierra foothills\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://www.acwd.org/\">Alameda County Water District\u003c/a>, serving the Fremont area, has no reservoirs because its local supply is the \u003ca href=\"http://www.acwd.org/index.aspx?NID=380\">groundwater of the Nile Cone\u003c/a>. But it has a unique “watershed” property where 19th-century gravel quarries on the Cone now serve as recharge ponds, and within the last 20 years the area has been developed as \u003ca href=\"http://www.ebparks.org/Page138.aspx\">Quarry Lakes Regional Recreation Area\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, the \u003ca href=\"http://www.valleywater.org/\">Santa Clara Valley Water District\u003c/a> has several reservoirs in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, access to which is managed by the county and San Jose city governments. It also has 70 miles of trails along the creeks and holding ponds of the valley floor. \u003ca href=\"http://www.valleywater.org/services/TrailMapLinks.aspx\">Find maps on this page.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Lost and Found: The 1906 Earthquake Rupture in Portola Valley",
"headTitle": "Lost and Found: The 1906 Earthquake Rupture in Portola Valley | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Geologic maps look as solid as the ground itself, with their crisp lines and firmly colored bedrock units. But geologists face the same bewildering world as the rest of us. Although they can see and visualize the bones of the land better than we can, mapping geology is as much a creative, interpretive act as an observational one. A paper in the current \u003cem>Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America\u003c/em> brings that home with a fresh look at a hundred years of geologic mapping in a high-stakes neighborhood: the leafy suburban town of Portola Valley, where the San Andreas fault tore the land apart in 1906.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The great earthquake of April 18, 1906 was intensively studied by Bay Area geologists who were present in large numbers at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. Once the rubble at Stanford was under control, Professor John C. Branner and his students fanned out into the nearby foothills to document the fresh fault ruptures there. Branner compiled the results on a map and submitted it to Professor Andrew Lawson at UC Berkeley, who was preparing a master report funded by the Carnegie Commission. The work went on, the Stanford people went back to their lives and studies and Lawson’s “Carnegie Report” was issued in 1908.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6798\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpinebranner.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6798\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6798\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpinebranner.png\" alt=\"Branner's 1906 map\" width=\"600\" height=\"438\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">J. C. Branner’s original master map of the 1906 fault rupture in Portola Valley, now at the Bancroft Library. Images from \u003ca href=\"http://www.bssaonline.org/content/103/4/2404.abstract\">\u003cem>BSSA\u003c/em> paper by Wrucke et al.\u003c/a>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The Carnegie Report has stood for more than a century as a monument in seismology. It was the first and last word on the fault for many years. In fact, geologists did not return to the fault in Portola Valley for another fifty years. When they did, things began to get fuzzy. Roads had been rebuilt, buildings replaced, earth moved and trees planted as the open farmlands turned to wooded suburbs. With the 1906 rupture long smoothed over, the new geologic mappers relied on the landscape as well as the Carnegie Report to reconstruct the fault as best they could. Subtle features, perhaps thousands of years old, were added to the fault—sometimes as older or secondary fault traces, sometimes as the active trace. A body of research, much of it unpublished, began to grow. New maps modified old ones, and each new mapper made fresh modifications.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6799\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpine1906.gif\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6799\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6799\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpine1906.gif\" alt=\"Alpine Road 1906\" width=\"500\" height=\"370\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alpine Road in 1906, above, and the same view today, below.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6800\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpine2013.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6800\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6800\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpine2013.jpg\" alt=\"Alpine Road 2013\" width=\"500\" height=\"370\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by Andrew Alden\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Along with the science, the laws grew up around the fault. The 1972 Alquist-Priolo Act required all active faults in the state to be mapped and construction-free zones set up around them. With that, the exact location of an active fault trace became a crucial matter in real estate. Trenching studies were done for new construction projects, some of which found the fault and some of which didn’t. Discrepancies and interpretations continued to multiply, and the fault turned into a tangle of lines on geologic maps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the turn of this century, it was clear that someone needed to take the whole thing again from the top, reanalyzing the original materials and assessing all the literature. How was the fault lost? Where did it really rupture in 1906? The job would take time, persistence and the judgment of a seasoned researcher. That’s what retired geologists are good for, and Chet Wrucke, emeritus scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, happens to live in Portola Valley. He had access to the 1906 archives plus a new lidar map of the area showing the ground stripped bare.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wrucke found that errors began with the Carnegie Report itself: Branner’s map was used in two different published maps. The first one was accurate but looked preliminary while the second was inaccurate but looked finished.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6801\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpine2maps.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6801\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6801\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpine2maps.png\" alt=\"1908 fault maps\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Map 4 (left) used a topographic base with no other features while map 22 (right) put the fault about 80 meters west. Later mappers relied on the fancy-looking map.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As he followed the literature he found more misinterpretations. Branner’s own notes were confusing, and some photographs from 1906 were later published reversed. Wrucke demonstrated this in one example by showing that a man’s suit had the buttons on the wrong side.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once the photos were put in their correct places, the fault trace was easy to find, even on today’s landscape, with the lidar images. (\u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/2012/11/15/geological-outings-around-the-bay-los-trancos-open-space/\">I showed you another example in nearby Los Trancos last year.\u003c/a>) It must have been especially satisfying for Wrucke to unveil Coal Mine Ridge, which is thickly carpeted with brush and poison oak, and see the 1906 trace running clearly up the hill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6802\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpinelidar.gif\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6802\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6802\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpinelidar.gif\" alt=\"Lidar image\" width=\"500\" height=\"423\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The hummocky landslide surface shows that the fault trace crossing it (features marked “B”) must be very recent.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s unfortunate that it took a century to make things right. But lidar surveys were used to great effect after the 2010 Baja California earthquake, and the tool will be ready when the San Andreas lets loose again.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "New tools and old-fashioned sleuthing have cleared away a century's worth of errors from our detailed picture of what the San Andreas fault did to Portola Valley in 1906.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Geologic maps look as solid as the ground itself, with their crisp lines and firmly colored bedrock units. But geologists face the same bewildering world as the rest of us. Although they can see and visualize the bones of the land better than we can, mapping geology is as much a creative, interpretive act as an observational one. A paper in the current \u003cem>Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America\u003c/em> brings that home with a fresh look at a hundred years of geologic mapping in a high-stakes neighborhood: the leafy suburban town of Portola Valley, where the San Andreas fault tore the land apart in 1906.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The great earthquake of April 18, 1906 was intensively studied by Bay Area geologists who were present in large numbers at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. Once the rubble at Stanford was under control, Professor John C. Branner and his students fanned out into the nearby foothills to document the fresh fault ruptures there. Branner compiled the results on a map and submitted it to Professor Andrew Lawson at UC Berkeley, who was preparing a master report funded by the Carnegie Commission. The work went on, the Stanford people went back to their lives and studies and Lawson’s “Carnegie Report” was issued in 1908.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6798\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 600px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpinebranner.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6798\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6798\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpinebranner.png\" alt=\"Branner's 1906 map\" width=\"600\" height=\"438\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">J. C. Branner’s original master map of the 1906 fault rupture in Portola Valley, now at the Bancroft Library. Images from \u003ca href=\"http://www.bssaonline.org/content/103/4/2404.abstract\">\u003cem>BSSA\u003c/em> paper by Wrucke et al.\u003c/a>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The Carnegie Report has stood for more than a century as a monument in seismology. It was the first and last word on the fault for many years. In fact, geologists did not return to the fault in Portola Valley for another fifty years. When they did, things began to get fuzzy. Roads had been rebuilt, buildings replaced, earth moved and trees planted as the open farmlands turned to wooded suburbs. With the 1906 rupture long smoothed over, the new geologic mappers relied on the landscape as well as the Carnegie Report to reconstruct the fault as best they could. Subtle features, perhaps thousands of years old, were added to the fault—sometimes as older or secondary fault traces, sometimes as the active trace. A body of research, much of it unpublished, began to grow. New maps modified old ones, and each new mapper made fresh modifications.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6799\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpine1906.gif\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6799\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6799\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpine1906.gif\" alt=\"Alpine Road 1906\" width=\"500\" height=\"370\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alpine Road in 1906, above, and the same view today, below.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6800\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpine2013.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6800\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6800\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpine2013.jpg\" alt=\"Alpine Road 2013\" width=\"500\" height=\"370\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by Andrew Alden\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Along with the science, the laws grew up around the fault. The 1972 Alquist-Priolo Act required all active faults in the state to be mapped and construction-free zones set up around them. With that, the exact location of an active fault trace became a crucial matter in real estate. Trenching studies were done for new construction projects, some of which found the fault and some of which didn’t. Discrepancies and interpretations continued to multiply, and the fault turned into a tangle of lines on geologic maps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the turn of this century, it was clear that someone needed to take the whole thing again from the top, reanalyzing the original materials and assessing all the literature. How was the fault lost? Where did it really rupture in 1906? The job would take time, persistence and the judgment of a seasoned researcher. That’s what retired geologists are good for, and Chet Wrucke, emeritus scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, happens to live in Portola Valley. He had access to the 1906 archives plus a new lidar map of the area showing the ground stripped bare.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wrucke found that errors began with the Carnegie Report itself: Branner’s map was used in two different published maps. The first one was accurate but looked preliminary while the second was inaccurate but looked finished.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6801\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpine2maps.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6801\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6801\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpine2maps.png\" alt=\"1908 fault maps\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Map 4 (left) used a topographic base with no other features while map 22 (right) put the fault about 80 meters west. Later mappers relied on the fancy-looking map.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As he followed the literature he found more misinterpretations. Branner’s own notes were confusing, and some photographs from 1906 were later published reversed. Wrucke demonstrated this in one example by showing that a man’s suit had the buttons on the wrong side.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once the photos were put in their correct places, the fault trace was easy to find, even on today’s landscape, with the lidar images. (\u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/2012/11/15/geological-outings-around-the-bay-los-trancos-open-space/\">I showed you another example in nearby Los Trancos last year.\u003c/a>) It must have been especially satisfying for Wrucke to unveil Coal Mine Ridge, which is thickly carpeted with brush and poison oak, and see the 1906 trace running clearly up the hill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6802\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpinelidar.gif\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6802\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6802\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/alpinelidar.gif\" alt=\"Lidar image\" width=\"500\" height=\"423\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The hummocky landslide surface shows that the fault trace crossing it (features marked “B”) must be very recent.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s unfortunate that it took a century to make things right. But lidar surveys were used to great effect after the 2010 Baja California earthquake, and the tool will be ready when the San Andreas lets loose again.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6486\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/sunspots.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6486\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/sunspots.jpg\" alt=\"sunspots, washington dc\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6486\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo courtesy \u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/ep_jhu/\">ep_jhu\u003c/a> of Flickr under Creative Commons license\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>I’ve been following earth science closely for many years through the news and in the literature. One thing I can say confidently is that it is both very human and inhuman. The human side is obvious: geoscientists are some of the most interesting (and interested) people I know. But doing science properly means quashing some of our most human traits as we subject our ideas to cold statistical tests. Case in point: earthquake prediction studies. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Humans have a wonderful ability to spot patterns in seemingly random information. We acquired the knack long ago because it helped us spot zebras in the savanna and tigers in the grass. It’s amusing because it lets us see faces in clouds. In science, our pattern-seeking ability is both a tool and a handicap: it leads us to exciting hunches, but glues us to wrong ideas despite our best efforts. The occurrence of earthquakes is so troubling and mysterious that it takes a great effort to stifle our human reactions and pay attention to what the cold numbers and their unintuitive statistics say. I take as today’s topic the relationship between earthquakes and sunspots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sun-Earth interface is an exceptionally energetic region, extending over thousands of kilometers from the upper atmosphere into outer space. It conducts electricity and generates complex magnetic disturbances. It’s as changeable and chaotic as the static heard between radio stations or the shimmering displays of the aurora. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It stands to reason that such a sensitive region would respond to changes from below the Earth’s surface just as it does to changes from above. You would think that the release of earthquake energy, in the electrically conducting deep crust, would have effects on this region too. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But “It stands to reason…” and “You would think that…” are hunches, only the beginning of science. Next comes the inhuman part: holding off on coming to conclusions and running the numbers as carefully as we know how. A trickle of scientific papers have noted apparent relationships between various measures of solar activity and earthquakes. But a recent critique of these papers, \u003ca href=\"http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50211/abstract\">published in March in \u003ci>Geophysical Research Letters\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, noted that all of them fell short in one way or another: they used partial sets of data or focused on one region, for instance. They went beyond “It stands to reason,” but only as far as finding an anomaly, something strange—that is to say, “Hmm, look at this.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The paper’s authors went on to do a textbook, double-checked study comparing the solar records to the earthquake catalogs, including statistical checks and found nothing that chance alone couldn’t explain just as well. (\u003ca href=\"http://geology.about.com/od/eq_prediction/qt/earthquakes-solar-activity.htm\">See my more detailed explanation here.\u003c/a>)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, most of us find it terribly tempting to go from “Hmm, look at this” to “Hey, look at that.” And once someone who seems to know what they’re talking about does that, many more people will take assertion as certainty. For a good example, consider the BBC’s weather blogger Paul Hudson. He’s a trained meteorologist who can explain scientific thinking well. \u003ca href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/posts/Have-weather-patterns-really-been-unusual\">Last month, for instance\u003c/a>, you can see him deftly handling a common question among the British public: isn’t our summer weather odd? No, he answers, it’s a phenomenon well-known among his fellow scientists: the North Atlantic Oscillation. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then go back on his blog to \u003ca href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2011/03/is-solar-activity-to-blame-for.shtml\">the day of the magnitude-9 Tohoku earthquake in March 2011\u003c/a>. Not being a seismologist, Hudson fell back on human habits: he remarked upon recent sunspot activity, cited a few unnamed papers, and quoted a fellow opinionater in support of his hunch. On this subject, he scored no better than the average layman. Indeed, I think that posting his off-the-cuff musings on the very day of that massive earthquake under the headline “Is solar activity to blame for Japan’s massive earthquake?” was not responsible journalism. Fortunately, the \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines\">Betteridge-Marr law of headlines\u003c/a> is our friend: “Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no.'”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "The science of earthquake prediction is fraught with the human tendency to seek conclusions beyond the reach of the data. In this setting, even the fruitless hypothesis of sunspots is seductive.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6486\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/sunspots.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6486\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/08/sunspots.jpg\" alt=\"sunspots, washington dc\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6486\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo courtesy \u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/people/ep_jhu/\">ep_jhu\u003c/a> of Flickr under Creative Commons license\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>I’ve been following earth science closely for many years through the news and in the literature. One thing I can say confidently is that it is both very human and inhuman. The human side is obvious: geoscientists are some of the most interesting (and interested) people I know. But doing science properly means quashing some of our most human traits as we subject our ideas to cold statistical tests. Case in point: earthquake prediction studies. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Humans have a wonderful ability to spot patterns in seemingly random information. We acquired the knack long ago because it helped us spot zebras in the savanna and tigers in the grass. It’s amusing because it lets us see faces in clouds. In science, our pattern-seeking ability is both a tool and a handicap: it leads us to exciting hunches, but glues us to wrong ideas despite our best efforts. The occurrence of earthquakes is so troubling and mysterious that it takes a great effort to stifle our human reactions and pay attention to what the cold numbers and their unintuitive statistics say. I take as today’s topic the relationship between earthquakes and sunspots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sun-Earth interface is an exceptionally energetic region, extending over thousands of kilometers from the upper atmosphere into outer space. It conducts electricity and generates complex magnetic disturbances. It’s as changeable and chaotic as the static heard between radio stations or the shimmering displays of the aurora. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It stands to reason that such a sensitive region would respond to changes from below the Earth’s surface just as it does to changes from above. You would think that the release of earthquake energy, in the electrically conducting deep crust, would have effects on this region too. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But “It stands to reason…” and “You would think that…” are hunches, only the beginning of science. Next comes the inhuman part: holding off on coming to conclusions and running the numbers as carefully as we know how. A trickle of scientific papers have noted apparent relationships between various measures of solar activity and earthquakes. But a recent critique of these papers, \u003ca href=\"http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50211/abstract\">published in March in \u003ci>Geophysical Research Letters\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, noted that all of them fell short in one way or another: they used partial sets of data or focused on one region, for instance. They went beyond “It stands to reason,” but only as far as finding an anomaly, something strange—that is to say, “Hmm, look at this.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The paper’s authors went on to do a textbook, double-checked study comparing the solar records to the earthquake catalogs, including statistical checks and found nothing that chance alone couldn’t explain just as well. (\u003ca href=\"http://geology.about.com/od/eq_prediction/qt/earthquakes-solar-activity.htm\">See my more detailed explanation here.\u003c/a>)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, most of us find it terribly tempting to go from “Hmm, look at this” to “Hey, look at that.” And once someone who seems to know what they’re talking about does that, many more people will take assertion as certainty. For a good example, consider the BBC’s weather blogger Paul Hudson. He’s a trained meteorologist who can explain scientific thinking well. \u003ca href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/posts/Have-weather-patterns-really-been-unusual\">Last month, for instance\u003c/a>, you can see him deftly handling a common question among the British public: isn’t our summer weather odd? No, he answers, it’s a phenomenon well-known among his fellow scientists: the North Atlantic Oscillation. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then go back on his blog to \u003ca href=\"http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2011/03/is-solar-activity-to-blame-for.shtml\">the day of the magnitude-9 Tohoku earthquake in March 2011\u003c/a>. Not being a seismologist, Hudson fell back on human habits: he remarked upon recent sunspot activity, cited a few unnamed papers, and quoted a fellow opinionater in support of his hunch. On this subject, he scored no better than the average layman. Indeed, I think that posting his off-the-cuff musings on the very day of that massive earthquake under the headline “Is solar activity to blame for Japan’s massive earthquake?” was not responsible journalism. Fortunately, the \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines\">Betteridge-Marr law of headlines\u003c/a> is our friend: “Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no.'”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Is Shale A More Realistic Candidate for Nuclear Waste Sites?",
"headTitle": "Is Shale A More Realistic Candidate for Nuclear Waste Sites? | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Civilian nuclear power plants came on line in the mid-1950s before most of us were born. Yet in all the years since then, there has never been a permanent place to keep their highly radioactive wastes. The resulting technological constipation was supposed to be solved with a repository carved into the volcanic rocks of Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada. As geologists got into the details, the worrisome part of Yucca Mountain turned out to be not rock, but water leakage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We think of rock as strong, permanent material, and we tend to think the best rock should be the strongest. The U.S. and other nations have sought to keep their wastes in deep, crystalline rocks like granite. But we are misled by the presence of rocky mountains and the impregnable facades of bank buildings. The hardest rock, in geological reality, is highly fractured stuff because with strength comes brittleness. Tests at Yucca Mountain showed that some of the cracks in its volcanic rocks could have allowed rainwater to trickle down to the storage levels in a mere 50 years—this in a facility that by law is supposed to keep things safe not just for 10,000 years, but a million. That was all the scientific evidence needed to reinforce the stiff political opposition to Yucca Mountain, and by the time the Obama administration told Congress in 2009 that the project was off the table, it was all over but the shouting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now a government hydrologist, \u003ca href=\"http://profile.usgs.gov/ceneuzil\">Christopher Neuzil\u003c/a>, uses his knowledge of groundwater to make a case instead for shale. The best metric for a waste repository rock is not its strength, he says, but its impermeability—resistance to water. This argument changes the game dramatically.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6044\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/07/shaletop.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6044\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/07/shaletop.jpg\" alt=\"Shale, Lake Berryessa\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6044\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Shale of the Great Valley Sequence, Lake Berryessa\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Shale, for our purposes, is rock that is primarily clay. Because geologists are choosy about what they call shale, Neuzil uses “shale” as shorthand for “argillaceous formations” (\u003ca href=\"http://geology.about.com/od/more_sedrocks/qt/About-Mudrocks.htm\">mudrocks and claystones\u003c/a>). Water has a very difficult time moving through it. A lot of specialists don’t like shale: water-well drillers find it unproductive; geotechnical engineers hate to deal with its poor strength; miners consider it waste rock; road builders must take special care in it. On the other hand, shale is good for municipal landfills and for wetlands precisely because it’s so impermeable. Thick beds of shale are what keeps “fracked” oil and gas separate from drinking-water supplies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neuzil’s publically readable paper, “\u003ca href=\"http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EO300001/pdf\">Can Shale Safely Host U.S. Nuclear Waste?\u003c/a>” is in this week’s issue of \u003ci>Eos\u003c/i>, the house organ of the American Geophysical Union. In it he points out an interesting peculiarity of shale: in many places it has different groundwater pressure than the surrounding rocks. In some places the shale has excess groundwater pressure; in others it’s actually negative—the rock would suck up more water if it could but it’s too impermeable. Imagine a waste repository in a place like that where water moves inward rather than outward.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The deeper significance of these anomalies is that they represent really, really long-term natural experiments. For instance, Neuzil describes a shale formation at the Bruce Nuclear Complex in Ontario where the hydraulic head is 400 meters lower than in the rock just 200 meters above it. The explanation is that the Ice Age glaciers there squeezed groundwater out of the shale, but in the roughly 10,000 years since the glaciers melted the groundwater has barely been able to start moving back. An overpressured shale body, on the other hand, could be holding its groundwater from a time millions of years earlier before erosion removed the rocks above it. These examples suggest how well this kind of rock can seal things off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6045\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 519px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/07/shalewater.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6045\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/07/shalewater.png\" alt=\"Groundwater pressures\" width=\"519\" height=\"305\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6045\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Depth profiles of groundwater pressure, measured as head relative to sea level (h), at four shale sites (dark gray). The two North American sites are underpressured and the two European sites are overpressured. Modified from \u003ca href=\"http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EO300001/pdf\">Neuzil (Eos, 2013)\u003c/a>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Similarly, Neuzil notes, shale blocks the movement of chemicals. Drill cores show that natural chemicals like chloride ions and hydrogen isotopes move through shale only a few centimeters per thousand years. Pure molecular diffusion, without any movement of water at all, is enough to account for that. These lines of evidence show that shale could very well meet the million-year criterion for waste repositories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Is there enough shale to handle our nuclear waste? Neuzil says that “the United States is in an enviable position with respect to the scale and sheer diversity in age, history, composition, and thickness of argillaceous formations within its borders.” It opens up the possibility of smaller, more localized repositories that share the national burden more widely. Politically, it means the states wouldn’t need to gang up on Nevada again. Scientifically, it means that more research into the details of shale would be a very fruitful public investment.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Civilian nuclear power plants came on line in the mid-1950s before most of us were born. Yet in all the years since then, there has never been a permanent place to keep their highly radioactive wastes. The resulting technological constipation was supposed to be solved with a repository carved into the volcanic rocks of Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada. As geologists got into the details, the worrisome part of Yucca Mountain turned out to be not rock, but water leakage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We think of rock as strong, permanent material, and we tend to think the best rock should be the strongest. The U.S. and other nations have sought to keep their wastes in deep, crystalline rocks like granite. But we are misled by the presence of rocky mountains and the impregnable facades of bank buildings. The hardest rock, in geological reality, is highly fractured stuff because with strength comes brittleness. Tests at Yucca Mountain showed that some of the cracks in its volcanic rocks could have allowed rainwater to trickle down to the storage levels in a mere 50 years—this in a facility that by law is supposed to keep things safe not just for 10,000 years, but a million. That was all the scientific evidence needed to reinforce the stiff political opposition to Yucca Mountain, and by the time the Obama administration told Congress in 2009 that the project was off the table, it was all over but the shouting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now a government hydrologist, \u003ca href=\"http://profile.usgs.gov/ceneuzil\">Christopher Neuzil\u003c/a>, uses his knowledge of groundwater to make a case instead for shale. The best metric for a waste repository rock is not its strength, he says, but its impermeability—resistance to water. This argument changes the game dramatically.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6044\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/07/shaletop.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6044\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/07/shaletop.jpg\" alt=\"Shale, Lake Berryessa\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6044\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Shale of the Great Valley Sequence, Lake Berryessa\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Shale, for our purposes, is rock that is primarily clay. Because geologists are choosy about what they call shale, Neuzil uses “shale” as shorthand for “argillaceous formations” (\u003ca href=\"http://geology.about.com/od/more_sedrocks/qt/About-Mudrocks.htm\">mudrocks and claystones\u003c/a>). Water has a very difficult time moving through it. A lot of specialists don’t like shale: water-well drillers find it unproductive; geotechnical engineers hate to deal with its poor strength; miners consider it waste rock; road builders must take special care in it. On the other hand, shale is good for municipal landfills and for wetlands precisely because it’s so impermeable. Thick beds of shale are what keeps “fracked” oil and gas separate from drinking-water supplies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neuzil’s publically readable paper, “\u003ca href=\"http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EO300001/pdf\">Can Shale Safely Host U.S. Nuclear Waste?\u003c/a>” is in this week’s issue of \u003ci>Eos\u003c/i>, the house organ of the American Geophysical Union. In it he points out an interesting peculiarity of shale: in many places it has different groundwater pressure than the surrounding rocks. In some places the shale has excess groundwater pressure; in others it’s actually negative—the rock would suck up more water if it could but it’s too impermeable. Imagine a waste repository in a place like that where water moves inward rather than outward.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The deeper significance of these anomalies is that they represent really, really long-term natural experiments. For instance, Neuzil describes a shale formation at the Bruce Nuclear Complex in Ontario where the hydraulic head is 400 meters lower than in the rock just 200 meters above it. The explanation is that the Ice Age glaciers there squeezed groundwater out of the shale, but in the roughly 10,000 years since the glaciers melted the groundwater has barely been able to start moving back. An overpressured shale body, on the other hand, could be holding its groundwater from a time millions of years earlier before erosion removed the rocks above it. These examples suggest how well this kind of rock can seal things off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_6045\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 519px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/07/shalewater.png\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-6045\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/07/shalewater.png\" alt=\"Groundwater pressures\" width=\"519\" height=\"305\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6045\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Depth profiles of groundwater pressure, measured as head relative to sea level (h), at four shale sites (dark gray). The two North American sites are underpressured and the two European sites are overpressured. Modified from \u003ca href=\"http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EO300001/pdf\">Neuzil (Eos, 2013)\u003c/a>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Similarly, Neuzil notes, shale blocks the movement of chemicals. Drill cores show that natural chemicals like chloride ions and hydrogen isotopes move through shale only a few centimeters per thousand years. Pure molecular diffusion, without any movement of water at all, is enough to account for that. These lines of evidence show that shale could very well meet the million-year criterion for waste repositories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Is there enough shale to handle our nuclear waste? Neuzil says that “the United States is in an enviable position with respect to the scale and sheer diversity in age, history, composition, and thickness of argillaceous formations within its borders.” It opens up the possibility of smaller, more localized repositories that share the national burden more widely. Politically, it means the states wouldn’t need to gang up on Nevada again. Scientifically, it means that more research into the details of shale would be a very fruitful public investment.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "East Bay Building Demolition to Provide Rare Earthquake Insights",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_5821\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/07/WarrenHall.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-5821\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-5821\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/07/WarrenHall.jpg\" alt=\"Earthquake geologists will study the demolition of Warren Hall on the Cal State East Bay campus. (Photo: Cal State East Bay)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Earthquake geologists will study the demolition of Warren Hall on the Cal State East Bay campus. (Photo: Cal State East Bay)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey are looking for volunteers in the East Bay to help document a powerful seismic event in mid-August, when a 13-story building on the California State University, East Bay campus \u003ca href=\"http://www20.csueastbay.edu/news/2013/03/WA-replacement-bldg-032013.html\">will come crashing down\u003c/a>, making way for a new, seismically stable replacement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The implosion of Warren Hall will mimic the energy of a 2.0-2.5 magnitude earthquake, giving geologists a unique chance to study what happens below the surface.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When USGS geophysicist Rufus Catchings got a phone call about the event months ago, he recalls not hesitating. “I said, ‘Oh yes! This is exactly what I’ve needed,” he said. “The fact that it’s so close to the Hayward Fault makes this a rare opportunity.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To measure the seismic waves, USGS is looking for volunteers in Hayward and the East Bay to help deploy a network of seismographs. Over the next month, they’ll be knocking on doors around campus, asking local residents to host the seismic instruments in their yards. Volunteers can \u003cstrong>\u003ca href=\"https://sslearthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/volunteer/\">sign up online\u003c/a>\u003c/strong>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The seismograph is about the size of a beer can,” Catchings said. “We’re trying to place about 600 of them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The data should reveal what the geologic layers around the Hayward Fault are made of, indicating how violently the area would shake during a major earthquake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You can largely see what’s at the surface, but many places, you go just a few feet below the surface and you have no idea what’s there,” Catchings said. “What’s down a few kilometers really affects the shaking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Geologists will also be looking for splays, or secondary faults, off the main fault. “A fault is not just one break in the ground,” he said. “It’s a zone of breaks and it’s difficult to tell just how wide that zone is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The data could provide a clearer picture of the damage a major earthquake would do. There’s a 63 percent chance of a major quake in the Bay Area over the next 20 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Related Video\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://science.kqed.org/quest/video/the-hayward-fault-predictable-peril/\">The Hayward Fault: Predictable Peril\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey are looking for volunteers in the East Bay to help document a powerful seismic event in mid-August, when a 13-story building on the California State University, East Bay campus will come crashing down, making way for a new, seismically stable replacement.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_5821\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/07/WarrenHall.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-5821\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-5821\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2013/07/WarrenHall.jpg\" alt=\"Earthquake geologists will study the demolition of Warren Hall on the Cal State East Bay campus. (Photo: Cal State East Bay)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Earthquake geologists will study the demolition of Warren Hall on the Cal State East Bay campus. (Photo: Cal State East Bay)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey are looking for volunteers in the East Bay to help document a powerful seismic event in mid-August, when a 13-story building on the California State University, East Bay campus \u003ca href=\"http://www20.csueastbay.edu/news/2013/03/WA-replacement-bldg-032013.html\">will come crashing down\u003c/a>, making way for a new, seismically stable replacement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The implosion of Warren Hall will mimic the energy of a 2.0-2.5 magnitude earthquake, giving geologists a unique chance to study what happens below the surface.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When USGS geophysicist Rufus Catchings got a phone call about the event months ago, he recalls not hesitating. “I said, ‘Oh yes! This is exactly what I’ve needed,” he said. “The fact that it’s so close to the Hayward Fault makes this a rare opportunity.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To measure the seismic waves, USGS is looking for volunteers in Hayward and the East Bay to help deploy a network of seismographs. Over the next month, they’ll be knocking on doors around campus, asking local residents to host the seismic instruments in their yards. Volunteers can \u003cstrong>\u003ca href=\"https://sslearthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/volunteer/\">sign up online\u003c/a>\u003c/strong>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The seismograph is about the size of a beer can,” Catchings said. “We’re trying to place about 600 of them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"marketplace": {
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
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"masters-of-scale": {
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},
"mindshift": {
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"order": 12
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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"onourwatch": {
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"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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},
"pbs-newshour": {
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},
"perspectives": {
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"order": 14
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"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
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"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Political-Breakdown-2024-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Possible-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.possible.fm/",
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"source": "Possible"
},
"link": "/radio/program/possible",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/730YpdUSNlMyPQwNnyjp4k"
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},
"pri-the-world": {
"id": "pri-the-world",
"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 2pm-3pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
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},
"radiolab": {
"id": "radiolab",
"title": "Radiolab",
"info": "A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.",
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