seismology

Advanced geodynamic models of giant earthquakes

Thyagarajulu Gollapalli and edited by Jyotirmoy Paul September 16, 2020

Photograph source: https://pixabay.com

Though giant earthquakes are disastrous, they provide essential information to investigate earthquake physics. In this week’s news and views, Thyagarajulu Gollapalli, a PhD student jointly from the Monash University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, discusses our present understanding of such big earthquakes and how advanced numerical models will help to get a more precise picture of ...[Read More]

Should we still study LLSVPs?

Iris van Zelst March 4, 2020

Tomography model S40RTS (Ritsema et al., 2011) at the CMB with velocity contours from -2 to 2 % δVs with increments of 0.5 % δVs.
Normally I’d add some kind of clever remark here, but it’s just a figure full of blobs. What can I say about that? Maybe that dogs are better? Scroll down for a dog! So proud that we finally have dog content on this blog.

All blobs are equal, but some blobs are more interesting than other blobs. In this new Wit & Wisdom post, Jamie Ward, PhD student in seismology at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, explores this age-old saying and discusses whether or not LLSVPs are the most important blobs in our lives. Also, there is a picture of a dog. It makes sense, I promise. Large Low Shear Velocity Provinces (LL ...[Read More]

Enigmas at depth

Editorial team 1 November 13, 2019

The Geodynamics 101 series serves to showcase the diversity of research topics and/or methods in the geodynamics community in an understandable manner. In this week’s Geodynamics 101 post, Marcel Thielmann, Senior Researcher at the University of Bayreuth, discusses the possible mechanisms behind the ductile deformation at great depths that causes deep earthquakes. Earthquakes are one of the expre ...[Read More]

On the resolution of seismic tomography models and the connection to geodynamic modelling (Is blue/red the new cold/hot?) (How many pixels in an Earth??)

Editorial Team 3 June 5, 2019

What do the blobs mean?

Seismologists work hard to provide the best snapshots of the Earth’s mantle. Yet tomographic models based on different approaches or using different data sets sometimes obtain quite different details. It is hard to know for a non specialist if small scale anomalies can be trusted and why. This week Maria Koroni and Daniel Bowden, both postdocs in the Seismology and Wave Physics group in ETH ...[Read More]