Strong Earthquake Hits New Guinea

[+susieice]

A 7.5 earthquake has hit New Guinea. Tsunami alerts have been issued.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/powerful-quake-hits-papua-guinea-tsunami-alert-issued-63026647

CBS is reporting the tsunami warning has passed. No word on possible damage yet.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/papua-new-guinea-earthquake-today-tsunami-alert-issued-after-powerful-quake-live-updates-2019-05-14/

Edited May 14, 2019 by susieice

[Doc Socks Junior]

Shallow, within-plate strike-slip faulting on the Pacific plate.

Only 10 kilometers deep!

[Piney]

1 hour ago, Doc Socks Junior said:

Shallow, within-plate strike-slip faulting on the Pacific plate.

Only 10 kilometers deep!

Hey boss! What's your opinion on the increase in tectonic movement due to the warming of the planet? 

[Doc Socks Junior]

9 minutes ago, Piney said:

Hey boss! What's your opinion on the increase in tectonic movement due to the warming of the planet? 

Increase in tectonic movement?  As far as the broad movement of the lithospheric plates, I'd give it a minor role.  A bigger effect on localized seismicity as areas adjust to changing ice loads and different precipitation regimes.  I'd have to look into it.  Increase in volcanic activity - I've heard that one.  Unloading as ice melts (decompression melting), increased fluid interactions in the subsurface (flux melting - volatiles); those can be somewhat linked to changing volcanic activity. 

[Piney]

10 minutes ago, Doc Socks Junior said:

Increase in volcanic activity - I've heard that one. 

I've heard that one too. That's why I wondered about a increase in seismic activity.  

Quick subject change.

 I found a Ordovician deposit in what was suppose to be Cretaceous in the famed Mantua Marls last week. It was interesting and students got to take home handfuls of Endoceras, which were as common as cockroaches then. I have to run over the soil maps to see what the Hell we hit. 

[Doc Socks Junior]

14 minutes ago, Piney said:

I've heard that one too. That's why I wondered about a increase in seismic activity.

Yeah.  I'd say the two parallel each other nicely.

14 minutes ago, Piney said:

  Quick subject change.

 I found a Ordovician deposit in what was suppose to be Cretaceous in the famed Mantua Marls last week. It was interesting and students got to take home handfuls of Endoceras, which were as common as cockroaches then. I have to run over the soil maps to see what the Hell we hit. 

Huh, that is very odd.  I'm not a huge fossils guy - did you find any belemnites around there?  

[+susieice]

1 hour ago, Piney said:

Hey boss! What's your opinion on the increase in tectonic movement due to the warming of the planet? 

I wonder if the Earth itself isn't going through changes. It does that once in a while. Sometimes dramatically. I'm sure we haven't helped things but I'm starting to wonder if we aren't going into a phase where the Earth itself is becoming more active. 

[Piney]

16 minutes ago, Doc Socks Junior said:

Huh, that is very odd.  I'm not a huge fossils guy - did you find any belemnites around there?  

Some, really fragile ones. They needed to stay in-situ in the marl if you wanted them whole. 

[Piney]

6 minutes ago, susieice said:

I wonder if the Earth itself isn't going through changes. It does that once in a while. Sometimes dramatically. I'm sure we haven't helped things but I'm starting to wonder if we aren't going into a phase where the Earth itself is becoming more active. 

I wondered that myself.

The Southwest U.S was a really volcanically active place only about 10 thousand years ago and I wondered with the activity in Central America if it was going to light up again.

@Doc Socks Junior  would know better.

 

[Doc Socks Junior]

12 minutes ago, susieice said:

I wonder if the Earth itself isn't going through changes. It does that once in a while. Sometimes dramatically. I'm sure we haven't helped things but I'm starting to wonder if we aren't going into a phase where the Earth itself is becoming more active. 

The Earth changing is inescapable.  Of course, not a surprise.

The thing about geologic timescales is that sudden, dramatic changes in the Earth are rarely sudden enough to intersect with human timescales.  Certain geologic events, of course, do.  Asteroid impacts.  Massive landslides.  But even a massive flood basalt outpouring takes place over millions of years.  Think Kiluaea but larger and longer.

Or, imagine a volcano in the Cascades erupting.  Some of the 'regional' scale shield volcanoes there (i.e. not the big ones like Rainier) are thought to be monogenetic.  That is, they erupted all in one semi-continuous event.  An event that would build kilometer-high edificies like that would be large and take place over several hundred years, almost erupting all the time.  Like Hawaii, f'rinstance.  And yet, things exactly like that have happened in the Cascades stretching back millions of years, and will continue to do so.

Our planet is an immensely active and dynamic place.  We are better at monitoring it now.

From that perspective, I would argue that the Earth probably isn't becoming more active sensu stricto.  I'd say we're better at noticing its activity.

2 minutes ago, Piney said:

I wondered that myself.

The Southwest U.S was a really volcanically active place only about 10 thousand years ago and I wondered with the activity in Central America if it was going to light up again.

@Doc Socks Junior  would know better.

Forget about 10,000 years ago, the Southwest has been active in historical times.  Sunset Crater in the San Francisco volcanic field, for instance. 1000 years ago.  The Cascades are going to be active in our lifetimes.  I'd imagine the SF volcanic field also.

But that's something we can extrapolate from the past.  Doesn't require any big changes to occur.  Activity in those areas is business as usual.

I think the teleconnection of events can be a little overstated.   

[+susieice]

The whole Ring of Fire from Alaska to Indonesia has been very active in the last 10 years. That's nothing in geological time. Mexico has volcanoes erupting. California has potentially 6 active volcanoes and Washington has Mt Rainier that last erupted in 1894. Mt Lassen erupted in 1917. Mt Shasta in 1786.

[Piney]

7 minutes ago, Doc Socks Junior said:

The thing about geologic timescales is that sudden, dramatic changes in the Earth are rarely sudden enough to intersect with human timescales.  Certain geologic events, of course, do.  Asteroid impacts.  Massive landslides.  But even a massive flood basalt outpouring takes place over millions of years.  Think Kiluaea but larger and longer.

I was always under the opinion that the Deccan Traps was instigated by Chicxulub impact. The planet literally cracked like a egg. Watching Kiluaea I can visualize the massive flow there and on the Siberian Craton. It had to be a incredible sight. 

[+susieice]

New Guinea just had a deep 7.2 earthquake on May 6th. That's two in a little over a week. Didn't know about this one.

https://watchers.news/2019/05/06/papua-new-guinea-earthquake-may-6-2019/

[Doc Socks Junior]

2 minutes ago, Piney said:

I was always under the opinion that the Deccan Traps was instigated by Chicxulub impact. The planet literally cracked like a egg. Watching Kiluaea I can visualize the massive flow there and on the Siberian Craton. It had to be a incredible sight. 

Deccan wasn't instigated by the impact, but the majority of it did come after the K-Pg boundary.  I think something like 75% of it (Sprain et al., 2019).  Thought is that the impact highly enhanced the amount of eruption (Richards et al., 2015).  Different, as the authors stress, from the antipodal focusing hypothesis.  How?  Well, the mechanism isn't quite clear.  Some type of reorganization of the magmatic plumbing.

Of course, others believe that the impact had little to do with it and the big pulses pre-dated the K-Pg (Schoene et al., 2019). 

Two good papers came out about it just now (the 2019 ones)...utilizing high-precision Ar-Ar and U-Pb dating.

Quote

Two timelines for extinction

The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction that wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs 66 million years ago was correlated with two extreme events: The Chicxulub impact occurred at roughly the same time that massive amounts of lava were erupting from the Deccan Traps (see the Perspective by Burgess). Sprain et al. used argon-argon dating of the volcanic ash from the Deccan Traps to argue that a steady eruption of the flood basalts mostly occurred after the Chicxulub impact. Schoene et al. used uranium-lead dating of zircons from ash beds and concluded that four large magmatic pulses occurred during the flood basalt eruption, the first of which preceded the Chicxulub impact. Whatever the correct ordering of events, better constraints on the timing and rates of the eruption will help elucidate how volcanic gas influenced climate.

 

[Doc Socks Junior]

30 minutes ago, susieice said:

The whole Ring of Fire from Alaska to Indonesia has been very active in the last 10 years. That's nothing in geological time. Mexico has volcanoes erupting. California has potentially 6 active volcanoes and Washington has Mt Rainier that last erupted in 1894. Mt Lassen erupted in 1917. Mt Shasta in 1786.

California has more potentially active volcanoes than 6.  I think around 11 of moderate threat.  Heck, I'm planning on clambering around one of 'em soon.

Point being, this amount of activity - and the places where it's occurring - is normal.