http://uninews.unimelb.edu.au/articleid_287.html
Evidence of faulting, buckling and uplift can be clearly seen in the young sediment record from this region. The team obtained an age for the various faults and folds by using a combination of fossils and radioactive isotope dating methods.

The findings confirm that the young mountain building and earthquake activity began around 10 million years ago and continues to the present day.

"This young faulting and folding has had very important economic effects for Australia. The giant oil and gas fields of the Gippsland Basin are largely trapped in young geological deformations produced by the seismic activity. Faulting, however, can also rupture the reservoirs and cause leakage.

http://www2b.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/arc...pic1505220.shtm


ARC Professorial Fellow, Mike Sandiford, from the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Sciences was recently awarded ARC funding for research aimed at understanding the forces that
drive the motion of the Earth’s tectonic plates and the distribution of stresses in the Earth’s crust that give rise to great earthquakes such as the magnitude 9 Boxing Day Sumatran quake.

Professor Sandiford says the research shows that as much as 10 per cent of the huge amounts of energy being created at plate connection points at Sumatra and Java are being transferred back
into our plate and causing major stresses.

“This is enough stress to contribute to mild earthquake activity in the central regions of the plate, such as in the Australian continent or central Indian Ocean, and provides us with clues as to why our plate has been slowly breaking up, he says.
“The Indian Ocean quakes are, in effect, leading to the active rupture of the Indo-Australian plate into separate Indian and Australian plates. This new research provides us with important
information about the stresses that are driving this drawn out tectonic plate divorce.

Japanese scientists say the Earth could be dry and barren within a billion years because the oceans are draining into the planet's interior.

Researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology have calculated that about 1.12 billion tonnes of water leaks into the Earth each year. Although a lot of water also moves in the other direction, not enough comes to the surface to balance what is lost.

Eventually, lead researcher Shigenori Maruyama and his colleagues believe, all of it will disappear.

Could Earth go the same way as Mars?
"Earth's surface will look very much like the surface of Mars, where a similar process seems to have taken place," Maruyama tells the latest edition of New Scientist magazine.

The water drains away at subduction zones, where the rock of the sea floor dives under the crustal rock that forms the continents. It is bound up in minerals in the transition zone, a layer of rock in the mantle that extends 400 to 650 kilometres below the surface of the Earth.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/articles/2...0205162571.html

YOUNGSTERS have dubbed them the "Teletubby houses" and a mushrooming field of white domes in the Indonesian village of Nglepen have become an unintended tourist attraction.

More than 70 dome homes have been built to replace housing flattened by the giant earthquake across Java's Yogyakarta region a year ago. At 6.3 on the Richter scale, it killed almost 6000 people and damaged more than 200,000 homes.