Syzdekistan

Great video of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupting. I suggest watching the video in full screen and watch for some spectacular lightning at the end during a plinian eruption (named after Pliny the Elder’s observations of Vesuvius burying Pompeii). This video was shot for British Channel 4 News. Blogger Dean Armstrong has been in that valley [...]

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I finally got a set of my Cuatrocienégas, Mexico travel photos (Link) posted. Enjoy!

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Looking at the USGS earthquake maps, there hasn’t been any 3+ magnitude earthquakes near Reno since last week. It looks like the seismicity is slowing down. There was a 5.4 in northwest California, however.
And yes, it would be crazy not to get earthquake reports from the USGS via RSS.

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I don’t even know what to make of the recent earthquakes near Reno. The typical pattern is to have a large earthquake followed by a series of smaller aftershocks or a “swarm” of earthquakes where all the earthquakes are about the right size (like the recent swarm off of the coast of Oregon). This pattern [...]

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Nevada has a lot of earthquakes but most happen in uninhabited areas. Rarely do they occur in populated areas but in February, Wells Nevada suffered serious damage from a quake. What would happen if when there was a quake in Las Vegas? Here is an article and an abstract from a Geological Society of America [...]

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I’m sure this didn’t really happen but this is how it would go down if you tried to put geologists on a reality TV show. It would be fun for them and boring TV. Other scientists would also be the same. I could imagine the herp twerp catching snakes and grabbing lizards, the fish people [...]

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When I wrote about the earthquake on February 21, I noted that the Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) rating of VI might be low: “Looking at the damage in Wells, I wonder if this be upgraded a bit once seismologist takes a look at the damage.”
A MMI of VI can be expected to be “Strong.”
“Felt [...]

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This morning at 6:16:05 A.M. a magnitude 6.0 earthquake struck near Wells Nevada. Not only was it a fairly powerful earthquake, it was shallow (9 km deep) and close to Wells (12 miles east). It did a lot of damage to the historic storefronts in Wells including knocking down facades and brick walls and littering [...]

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