"Earthquakes are labeled “shallow” if they occur at less than 50 kilometers depth. They are labeled “deep” if they occur at 300-700 kilometers depth. When slippage occurs during these earthquakes, the faults weaken. How this fault weakening takes place is central to understanding earthquake sliding. A new study published online in Nature Geoscience today by...
"The earliest instrumental records of Earth’s climate, as measured by thermometers and other tools, start in the 1850s. To look further back in time, scientists investigate air bubbles trapped in ice cores, which expands the window to less than a million years. But to study Earth’s history over tens to hundreds of millions of years...
"A team of researchers, including one from the University of California, Riverside, has discovered that earthquake ruptures can jump much further than previously thought, a finding that could have severe implications on the Los Angeles area and other regions in the world. The scientists found that an earthquake that initiates on one thrust fault can...
"An understanding of the history of Earth is incomplete without an understanding of how and why the planet developed an oxygenated atmosphere. A team of scientists, including Timothy Lyons, a distinguished professor of biogeochemistry, reports new isotopic data in Science Advances that illustrate how photosynthetic cyanobacteria temporarily spiked concentrations of oxygen around 2.5 billion years...
"How life’s evolution can be tracked using ancient lipid biomarkers preserved in petroleum and rocks is the topic of a free public lecture at the University of California, Riverside. Gordon Love, a professor of biogeochemistry at UC Riverside, will give the hour-long talk starting at 7 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 12, in Room A265, Bourns Hall."...
"Manuel Mendoza, a master’s student at UC Riverside working with Abhijit Ghosh, assistant professor in the Department of Earth Sciences, was one of only two graduate students in the country to be selected by the Seismological Society of America (SSA) to receive travel grants to attend the 8th annual Geosciences Congressional Visits Day in Washington...
"Faculty, staff and students at the University of California, Riverside will join 10 million people expected to participate in the annual Great California ShakeOut earthquake drill on Thursday, Oct. 15 at 10:15 a.m. The approximately two-minute drill is a voluntary exercise as a first response to a simulated magnitude 7.8 earthquake along the southern San...
"Certain specimens of the fossil Dickinsonia are incomplete because ancient currents lifted them from the sea floor, a team of researchers led by paleontologists at the University of California, Riverside has found. Sand then got deposited beneath the lifted portion, the researchers report, strongly suggesting that Dickinsonia was mobile, easily separated from the sea floor...
"On Saturday, April 11, 2015, aspiring and professional scientists gathered at the University of California, Riverside to share research and interest in the integrative field of geobiology. The 12th Annual Southern California Geobiology Symposium, organized for and by graduate students, displayed current work within geology, geochemistry, biology, astrobiology, microbiology, oceanography, paleobiology, paleoecology and environmental sciences."...
"An earthquake expert at the University of California, Riverside is leading a team of seismologists and volcanologists to conduct an experiment in Alaska that will record a variety of seismic events in that state. The experiment will also help better describe the characteristics of the Alaska-Aleutian subduction zone, one of the most seismically active regions...
"If we’re looking at Mars, or planets in solar systems far, far away, how can we tell whether they support life? Researchers at the University of California, Riverside will share a $50 million grant from the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) to help answer that question by studying ancient rocks on Earth to determine how oxygen...
"Geologists are letting the air out of a nagging mystery about the development of animal life on Earth. Scientists have long speculated as to why animal species didn’t flourish sooner, once sufficient oxygen covered the Earth’s surface. Animals first appeared and began to prosper at the end of the Proterozoic period, about 600 to 700...
"Oxygen in the atmosphere and ocean rose dramatically about 600 million years ago, coinciding with the first proliferation of animal life. Since then, numerous short-lived biotic events — typically marked by significant climatic perturbations — took place when oxygen concentrations in the ocean dipped episodically." Read More
" Wilfred Elders, a professor emeritus of geology at the University of California, Riverside, convened the “International Geothermal Workshop” in Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains, Oct. 13-16, to discuss developing new ways to produce electrical energy from geothermal fields." Read More
"More than 20 years ago, geologist Harry Green, now a distinguished professor of the graduate division at the University of California, Riverside, and colleagues discovered a high-pressure failure mechanism that they proposed then was the long-sought mechanism of very deep earthquakes (earthquakes occurring at more than 400 km depth). The result was controversial because seismologists...
"The Summit fire burned more than 3,000 acres of vegetation near Banning, Calif., in early May this year, giving Southern California’s fire season an early start. What lies in store for the rest of the fire season this year? Richard Minnich, a professor of Earth sciences and a noted fire ecologist at the University of...
"A research team of biogeochemists at the University of California, Riverside has provided a new view on the relationship between the earliest accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere, arguably the most important biological event in Earth history, and its relationship to the sulfur cycle." Read More
"Most researchers imagine the initial oxygenation of the ocean and atmosphere to have been something like a staircase, but with steps only going up. The first step, so the story goes, occurred around 2.4 billion years ago, and this, the so-called Great Oxidation Event, has obvious implications for the origins and evolution of the first...
