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 This work by Dr Ian G. Stimpson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.  |
A very large earthquake, at 8.8, the sixth largest since modern seismic recording began around 1900, has struck off-shore southern Chile. More details from the USGS and Ole Nielsen. At 107° epicentral distance, Keele is just in the shadow zone so the direct P and S-waves are not recorded. However, even at a distance of almost 12,000 km our seismometer went off-scale during the surface wave arrivals.
After 185 episodes I’ve finally won a Wo(G)E !! The bright orange colours led me immediately to the Namib Desert, it was just a matter of time until I found where two dune sets interfered at right angles to give the pattern in the image. Now the only problem is that in the past week I have been having huge fun submitting images to the new multi-authored geopathology blog. It is devoted to landscapes that are pathological “in the sense of being developed or expressed in such a degree that is extreme, excessive, or markedly abnormal” according to the blog’s founder Dr Jerque. If you are a devotee of Wo(G)E and haven’t seen geopathology then please drop by, I’m sure you will find it of interest. Anyway, as a consequence of this, and never expecting to actually win a Wo(G)E, I have just blown most of the places I would have used for a place for you to find. Typical. The image below has an eye altitude of about 12km and note that north is to the right. Vertical exaggeration is set to two and it is slightly oblique to make the structure a little more obvious. So I need to know the latitude and longitude of the image, a general locality name and an explanation of the geological feature(s) illustrated. The first person with the correct answers gets to host the next edition. No Schott rule on this one – everyone just dive in. Click the image for a larger version. There was a small earthquake just south of Nantwich, Cheshire on January 31st, 2010 which we recorded here at Keele.
The earthquake magnitude has been determined by the Geological survey to be 1.3 The tremor is most likely related to subsidence or collapse due to dissolution of salt. The bedrock here is the Wilkesley Halite and in the Google Maps image of the earthquake location below salt dissolution features can be seen. A word of warning though as this location from the British Geological Survey is unlikely to be precise.
Two more small local earthquakes have occurred in Stoke-On-Trent following on from the two that happened on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Both were magnitude 1.8 and are probably related to old mine workings beneath the city. This week I presented some work in progress on the use of gigapan and photosynth to assist mobility impaired geology students at the “Overcoming Barriers to Learning in the Geosciences” meeting of the Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences (GEES) subject centre of the Higher Education Academy (HEA).
I’ve embedded the presentation below. Feel free to use any of the ideas but obviously if you use any of it please credit the source. If you have any questions, comments or feedback please use the blog comments. [Apologies for my powerpoint style - I tend to talk over images without using much text on the slides but this wouldn't make much sense in this context so I have added what I said to the images.] |
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