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.
View Nantwich Quake in a larger map
Geoblogosphere
