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Fingerprinting Slow Earthquakes

Posted by timothy on Thursday April 23, 2009 @07:33AM from the more-of-an-earthshrug dept.

CarnegieScience writes "The most powerful earthquakes happen at the junction of two converging tectonic plates, where one plate is sliding (or subducting) beneath the other. Now a team of researchers, led by Teh-Ru Alex Song of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, has found that an anomalous layer at the top of a subducting plate coincides with the locations of slow earthquakes and non-volcanic tremors. The presence of such a layer in similar settings elsewhere could point to other regions of slow quakes."

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Re:Paging all geologists by b0ttle · 2009-04-23 07:47 · Score: 5, Informative

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_earthquake
Re:Hawaii, Where All the Action Is by dragonjujotu · 2009-04-23 08:02 · Score: 4, Interesting

I'm confused, did I learn the wrong thing from all those old science clips that show Pangaea breaking apart and the Atlantic ocean forms as the Americas separate from Europe/Africa?

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Yes, I am obsessed with ellipses.
Thin end of the wedge by Anonymous Coward · 2009-04-23 08:18 · Score: 3, Funny

This is a bad idea.
Soon enough they will start fingerprinting the smart earthquakes. And before long they will be swabbing the mouths of the earthquakes looking for DNA.