Scientific Ocean Drilling

Researchers from Heriot-Watt University have confirmed the key causes behind the devastation caused by the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami. The study, part of an international research team, “provides the clearest evidence yet that a thin, clay-rich layer just beneath the seabed at the Japan Trench played a central role in allowing the magnitude 9.0 earthquake to rupture all the way to the surface”.

Due to its thick, vast ice sheet, Antarctica appears to be a single, continuous landmass centered over the South Pole and spanning both hemispheres of the globe. The Western Hemisphere sector of the ice sheet is shaped like a hitchhiker’s thumb – an apt metaphor, because the West Antarctic ice sheet is on the go.

How could a continent with a surface area of almost 5 million square kilometers, larger than India or almost two-thirds the size of Australia, remain absent from maps and ignored by the scientific world? It's because it's 95% submerged and, as a result, its boundaries have remained undefined or falsely integrated into the Australian continent.

An international research expedition involving Cornell has uncovered new details as to why a 2011 earthquake northeast of Japan behaved so unusually as it lifted the seafloor and produced a tsunami that devastated coastal communities along with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Scientists for the first time have detected a slow slip earthquake in motion during the act of releasing tectonic pressure on a major fault zone at the bottom of the ocean. The slow earthquake was recorded spreading along the tsunami-generating portion of the fault off the coast of Japan, behaving like a tectonic shock absorber.

Rock samples collected from the depths of the South Atlantic Ocean, dating back approximately 60 million years, have provided crucial insights into how significant amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) can remain sequestered over extensive periods.