Featured
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Research Highlight |
Quake that battered ancient Rome is traced to its lair
A fault in the Apennine Mountains wreaked damage on structures including the Colosseum.
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News |
Arctic scientists iced out by US–India radar mission
Managers’ decision to focus their satellite on the Antarctic has upset some researchers who study ice around the northern pole.
- Alexandra Witze
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News |
Earth’s magnetic field is acting up and geologists don’t know why
Erratic motion of north magnetic pole forces experts to update model that aids global navigation.
- Alexandra Witze
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Research Highlight |
Why massive earthquakes menace the Himalayas
Area hit by a deadly quake in 2015 is at risk of even greater disaster.
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Brief Communications Arising |
Elasticity of lower-mantle bridgmanite
- Jung-Fu Lin
- , Zhu Mao
- & Suyu Fu
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Letter |
Origin of spatial variation in US East Coast sea-level trends during 1900–2017
Vertical motions of Earth’s crust had the greatest effect on regional spatial differences in relative sea-level trends along the eastern coast of the USA during 1900–2017, explaining most of the large-scale spatial variance in regional rates of sea-level rise.
- Christopher G. Piecuch
- , Peter Huybers
- & Martin P. Tingley
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News Feature |
The hunt for life below Antarctic ice
In the next few weeks, researchers in Antarctica will drill through 1,100 metres of ice into a lake that has remained sealed for millennia. Here’s what they hope to find.
- Douglas Fox
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Research Highlight |
River bounces back after world’s largest-ever dam removal
The Elwha River quickly cleared itself of debris after dams’ demolition.
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News |
East Antarctica is losing ice faster than anyone thought
Four rivers of ice are shrinking in the part of the frozen continent that’s supposed to be stable.
- Alexandra Witze
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News |
Earthquake-risk maps pinpoint world’s most vulnerable areas
Indonesia and India are among the countries with the most people at risk.
- Alexandra Witze
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Letter |
Chemical differentiation, cold storage and remobilization of magma in the Earth’s crust
Magma storage and differentiation in the Earth’s crust mainly occurs by reactive melt flow in long-lived mush reservoirs, rather than by fractional crystallization in magma chambers, as previously thought.
- M. D. Jackson
- , J. Blundy
- & R. S. J. Sparks
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News |
Tehran’s drastic sinking exposed by satellite data
Parts of Iran’s capital city, home to 13 million people, are subsiding by 25 centimetres each year.
- Kate Ravilious
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Research Highlight |
Oil drilling linked to a spate of Los Angeles earthquakes
A frenzy of drilling may have caused quakes in the first half of the twentieth century.
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News & Views |
Water takes a deep dive into an oceanic tectonic plate
A tectonic plate descending into the Mariana Trench carries sea water deep into Earth’s interior. It seems that much more water enters Earth at this location than was thought — with implications for the global water budget.
- Donna J. Shillington
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Letter |
Water input into the Mariana subduction zone estimated from ocean-bottom seismic data
Seismic images of Earth’s crust and uppermost mantle around the Mariana trench show widespread serpentinization, suggesting that much more water is subducted than previously thought.
- Chen Cai
- , Douglas A. Wiens
- & Melody Eimer
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Article |
Rock fluidization during peak-ring formation of large impact structures
Catastrophic rock weakening upon impact of a meteorite, and hence flow, is shown to be followed by regained rock strength that enabled the formation of the peak ring during cratering.
- Ulrich Riller
- , Michael H. Poelchau
- & Timothy J. Bralower
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News |
Italian earthquake data hint at possibility of forecasting one type of quake
Study suggests how ‘sequence’ quakes are constrained by their geology, which could allow scientists to forecast the large follow-up shakes.
- Kate Ravilious
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Research Highlight |
The hidden talent of a dangerous Icelandic volcano
Katla, known for its frequent and explosive eruptions, produces more carbon dioxide than almost any other volcano on Earth.
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Research Highlight |
The devastating death toll forecast for Himalayan quakes
Hundreds of thousands of lives are at risk as a result of population boom in seismic zone.
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News & Views |
Machine learning improves forecasts of aftershock locations
Understanding how earthquakes interact is key to reliable earthquake forecasting. A machine-learning study reveals how the stress change induced by earthquakes at geological faults affects these interactions.
- Gregory C. Beroza
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News |
Artificial intelligence nails predictions of earthquake aftershocks
A neural-network analysis outperforms the method scientists typically use to work out where these tremors will strike.
- Alexandra Witze
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News |
Geoscience society rescinds award to top seismologist after ethics investigation
The American Geophysical Union says it received a ‘conduct-related complaint’ against Thomas Jordan.
- Sara Reardon
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Books & Arts |
A visceral history of dinosaurs, the world through the nose of a dog and the psychological secrets of the plot twist: Books in brief
Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks.
- Barbara Kiser
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News |
How San Francisco’s next big quake could play out
Tremors in Nepal and New Zealand help scientists to predict how a magnitude-7.0 quake would affect the California city.
- Alexandra Witze
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Editorial |
Ocean circulation is changing, and we need to know why
Long-term monitoring is essential for working out how alterations in the Atlantic Ocean current system will affect the planet.
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Research Highlight |
Gentle ‘slow slip’ earthquakes belie hidden danger
Fluid build-up after a slow quake raises the risk of massive rupture.
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News & Views |
Oceans on Mars formed early
The geometry of putative ancient shorelines on Mars suggests that these features were deformed by the growth of a massive volcanic region — a finding that has implications for the climate, geology and hydrology of early Mars.
- Maria T. Zuber
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Research Highlight |
Unprecedented recordings capture a volcano’s thunder
Thunder during eruption grumbled in both audible and inaudible frequencies.
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Letter |
Redox-influenced seismic properties of upper-mantle olivine
Redox conditions and associated defect chemistry rather than water content, as previously thought, strongly influence the seismic properties of olivine, the main constituent mineral of Earth’s upper mantle.
- C. J. Cline II
- , U. H. Faul
- & I. Jackson
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News & Views |
Oxidation softens mantle rocks
Seismic waves that propagate through a layer of Earth’s upper mantle are highly attenuated. Contrary to general thinking, this attenuation seems to be strongly affected by oxidation conditions, rather than by water content.
- Tetsuo Irifune
- & Tomohiro Ohuchi
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News |
Drilling project probes New Zealand’s risk of killer quakes
Major expedition will investigate enigmatic sea-floor fault zone.
- Alexandra Witze
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Editorial |
The scientist who predicted ice-sheet collapse — 50 years ago
A seminal 1968 study warned of the demise of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
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Books & Arts |
How the planet’s poles keep trading places
Peter Olson savours a study of Earth’s protective magnetic field — and the people who discovered it.
- Peter Olson
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News |
Scientific ballooning takes off
Commercial providers open the market for new types of research flight.
- Alexandra Witze
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Letter |
Initiation and long-term instability of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet
Geophysical and geological data reveal increased ice-sheet variability and surface meltwater—possibly analogous to future conditions—offshore of the Aurora subglacial basin of East Antarctica during warm climate intervals of the past 50 million years.
- Sean P. S. Gulick
- , Amelia E. Shevenell
- & Donald D. Blankenship
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News |
Rescued radar maps reveal Antarctica's past
More than 2 million newly digitized images extend the history of the bottom of the ice sheet.
- Alexandra Witze
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News |
Gravity signals could speedily warn of big quakes and save lives
The trick lies in capturing the weak gravitational shifts in the ground.
- Alexandra Witze
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Research Highlight |
Faster tectonic-plate collisions spell bigger earthquakes
Big tremors are more likely in mountain ranges where plates grind together at high speed.
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News & Views |
The buoyancy of Earth's deep mantle
The physical nature of two regions called large low-shear-velocity provinces at the base of Earth's mantle is uncertain. A measurement of their density has implications for our understanding of mantle dynamics. See Article p.321
- Barbara Romanowicz
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Article |
Tidal tomography constrains Earth’s deep-mantle buoyancy
An estimate of Earth’s deep-mantle buoyancy is derived from GPS-based measurements of body tide deformation and shown to be dominated by dense material possibly related to subducted oceanic plates or primordial rock.
- Harriet C. P. Lau
- , Jerry X. Mitrovica
- & David Al-Attar
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Letter |
Hydrogen-bearing iron peroxide and the origin of ultralow-velocity zones
A reaction between iron and water at the high pressure and temperature of the lowermost mantle is described that produces hydrogen-bearing iron peroxide, which has the properties expected of the ultralow-velocity zones at Earth’s core–mantle boundary.
- Jin Liu
- , Qingyang Hu
- & Wendy L. Mao
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News & Views |
Evaporating planetesimals
Two studies show that evaporation of molten rock was intrinsic to the formation of Earth and other rocky bodies in the Solar System, suggesting that violent collisions played a key part in the formation process. See Letters p.507 & p.511
- Edward D. Young
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Research Highlight |
As the sea dried, volcanoes awoke
‘Unloading’ of Earth’s surface caused a rise in eruptive activity.
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News |
Seismologists stumped by mystery shock after North Korean nuclear test
A second jolt felt minutes after this month's detonation continues to confound researchers.
- David Cyranoski
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News |
Global fingerprints of sea-level rise revealed by satellites
Geological processes send more meltwater from glaciers and ice sheets to Earth's mid-latitudes.
- Rachael Lallensack
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News Feature |
Creeping earth could hold secret to deadly landslides
Scientists investigate why mountain slopes can slip slowly for years and then suddenly speed up, with potentially fatal effects.
- Jane Palmer
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Nature Podcast |
Podcast: Slow landslides, and research reproducibility
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Research Highlight |
A better forecast for complex quakes
Model combines long- and short-term risks and could be useful around the world.