MONUMENTAL GEOLOGICAL UPHEAVALS: Massive 2015 Alaskan Landslide That Triggered A Mega-Tsunami Is Estimated To Be The BIGGEST NON-VOLCANIC Landslide In North American History - Over 200 MILLION METRIC TONS Of Rock Landed On The Tyndall Glacier!

The site of an October landslide in Taan Fiord, within Icy Bay, Alaska.
© Chris Larsen

April 11, 2016 - ALASKA - After a period of heavy rains, about 200 million metric tons of rock tumbled down a remote Southeast Alaska mountain. The massive landslide, lasting about 60 seconds, occurred on October 17, 2015, and landed on the toe of Tyndall Glacier and into Taan Fiord in Icy Bay, Alaska.

The event generated a local megatsunami that sheared trees more than 152.4 meters (500 feet) up on a peninsula within the fiord. It was big enough to register at the nearest tidal gauge 155 km (96.3 miles) away. For comparison, the 2011 tsunami in Japan reached about 39.6 meters (130 feet) above sea level.

This event, now estimated as the biggest nonvolcanic landslide, by volume, in North America's written history, was registered by special seismograms monitored by the Global CMT Project at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory whose seismologists Göran Ekström and Colin Stark have invented a new technique that uses seismic waves to detect landslides in remote areas where they might otherwise go unrecorded.

Spruce trees shaved off a peninsula within Taan Fiord by a landslide-generated wave last October.© Chris Larsen

Since winter snows hid the damage generated by the tsunami it took several months to see the extent of the damage. Upon hearing a report from a pilot colleague that the landslide area of Icy Bay was free of snow, glaciologist Chris Larsen of the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute flew there in his Cessna 180. Larsen used a camera system mounted in his plane to make a high-resolution map of the landslide and the path of the megatsunami.

"It almost blows away everything in the historical record except for Lituya Bay," Larsen said. "It's really a unique event to have a tsunami 100 meters (328 feet) high. If it was September or any time in the summer, the wave could have gotten a fishing boat or two.

"The Lituya Bay landslide, Larsen referred to, occurred in 1958 after a powerful M8.0 earthquake. The wave that followed ripped spruce from 518 m (1 700 feet) up a mountain slope and left trimlines in the bay that are visible today.

Icy Bay and places like it will have more landslides as time goes on, Larsen said. Warmer temperatures melt more glacial ice that buttress hillsides. When the ice melts, oversteepened slopes will fail. Sometimes it takes a big rain or an earthquake to shake them down.

"These megatsunamis are infrequent in the historical record but will most likely increase," Larsen added. - The Watchers.

MONUMENTAL GEOLOGICAL UPHEAVAL: NASA Satellite Detects Massive Landslide In Southeastern Alaska - Involved The Displacement Of 68 MILLION METRON TONS Of Material; The Largest Known Landslide On Earth Since 2010!

February 25, 2014 - ALASKA - Using imagery from the Landsat 8 satellite, scientists have confirmed that a large landslide occurred in southeastern Alaska on February 16, 2014. Preliminary estimates suggest the landslide on the flanks of Mount La Perouse involved 68 million metric tons (75 million short tons) of material, which would make it the largest known landslide on Earth since 2010.

The Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 acquired this image on February 23, 2014. The avalanche debris appears light brown compared to the snow-covered surroundings. The sediment slid in a southeasterly direction, stretching across 4.8 kilometers (2.9 miles) and mixing with ice and snow in the process. The slide was triggered by the collapse of a near-vertical mountain face at an elevation of 3,000 meters (10,000 feet), according to David Petley, a geologist at Durham University.

Columbia University scientists Göran Ekström and Colin Stark realized that a landslide may have occurred when they saw evidence in data collected by a global earthquake monitoring network. The earthquake sensors detect seismic waves—vibrations that radiate through Earth’s crust because of sudden movements of rock, ice, magma, or debris.

While earthquake sensors are tuned to detect intense, “short-period” seismic waves produced by sudden slips along faults, Ekström and Stark found evidence of the slide by analyzing “long-period” waves produced by landslides. However, Ekström and Stark could not pinpoint the exact location of the slide based on the seismic data alone; they could only say that it had occurred within a 25 square-kilometer (10 square-mile) area.

To pinpoint the location, the scientists needed observations from either aircraft or a satellite. In this case, the first confirmation of the slide came on February 22, 2014, when helicopter pilot Drake Olson flew over and photographed landslide debris at 58.542 degrees North and 137.01 West. - Earth Observatory.

GLOBAL VOLCANISM: Scientists Find Huge Magma Chamber Below Hawaii's Kilauea Volcano!

January 30, 2014 - HAWAII - Geologists say they've confirmed the existence of a previously unknown large, deep magma chamber below Hawaii's Kilauea volcano.

Credit: USGS

The discovery offers new insight into the largely unknown internal plumbing of volcanoes, scientists at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science reported Wednesday.

The finding at the world's most active volcano is the first geophysical observation that large magma chambers exist in the deeper parts of a volcano system, they said.

The scientists analyzed seismic waves moving through the volcano to understand the internal structure of the volcanic system, finding a lava chamber at least a mile in diameter and located at a depth of 5 miles to 6.8 miles.

"It was known before that Kilauea had small, shallow magma chambers," geologists and lead study author Guoqing Lin said. "This study is the first geophysical observation that large magma chambers exist in the deep oceanic crust below."

The magma reservoir below Kilauea is similar to those widely observed beneath volcanoes located at mid-ocean ridges, the researchers said.

"Understanding these magma bodies are a high priority because of the hazard posed by the volcano," said geophysics Professor Falk Amelung, the study co-author. "Kilauea volcano produces many small earthquakes and paying particular attention to new seismic activity near this body will help us to better understand where future lava eruptions will come from." - UPI.

PLANETARY TREMORS: Seismic Rock Ruptures Reported In Kuwait - But No Earthquake?!

November 26, 2013 - KUWAIT - The national seismic network at Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) said on Tuesday that it had detected seismic waves in some of the network’s stations, at 10:06 a.m., but no activity that classifies as an earthquake.

The network’s press release indicated the investigation into the observation showed that the readings were caused by rock ruptures.

It further explained that a seismic wave is a wave of energy that travels through the Earth’s layers, and could be the result of an earthquake, explosion, or a volcano that imparts low-frequency acoustic energy, and also some types of human activity.

On October 29, 2013, the region of Kuwait was hit by a 3.7 magnitude tremor. - KUNA.

PLANETARY TREMORS: Seismic Data Reveal "Hotspot" Passed Under United States - 2011 Virginia Earthquake Points To Scars From Ancient Mantle Plume!

September 15, 2013 - UNITED STATES - A plume of hot material rising from deep within the earth scarred the underside of the North American tectonic plate as it drifted westward millions of years ago, suggests research published today in Nature Geoscience. The residual heat still affects seismic waves travelling through the continent, even though the mantle plume is now under the Atlantic Ocean.

When such mantle plumes occur beneath thin oceanic crust, they often punch through and create volcanoes — the Hawaiian Islands are a prime example. But older, colder and thicker continental crust is not so easily breached, says Risheng Chu, a geophysicist at the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics in Wuhan, China. The only signs on land of ancient hotspot paths typically are kimberlites — volcanic and sometimes diamond-bearing rocks that mark the site of an ancient, deep-seated eruption.

But Chu and his colleagues inferred the path of a hotspot beneath eastern North America using a different sort of evidence — the speed of seismic waves, which travel more slowly in warmer rock. The data were gathered by dozens of seismometers in the USArray network, most of them along a stretch from Louisiana to Wisconsin, during the magnitude-5.6 quake that jolted central Virginia on 23 August 2011.

Their analysis indicates that seismic waves travelling west from the earthquake’s source in Virginia towards Missouri arrived at seismometers later and with lower intensity than expected. Such vibration-damping behaviour suggests the presence of a broad lane of warm rocks running east to west, about 200 kilometres beneath Kentucky — a depth that roughly coincides with the lower surface of the tectonic plate. Seismic waves travelling north and south of this lane arrived on time or slightly ahead of schedule.

Seismometers northeast of the Virginia quake’s epicentre also detected slow, stifled seismic waves, suggesting another hotspot track in that direction as well. The researchers suggest that the continent moving over the hotspot cut a path that swooped east-southeast from central Missouri (90 million years ago) to eastern Kentucky (some 70 million years ago), arced northeastward to Massachusetts (60 million to 50 million years ago) and then swerved eastward and moved offshore. A kimberlite deposit in eastern Kentucky, dated to about 75 million years ago, bolsters the notion that a hotspot lay below the region during that time, Chu and his colleagues contend.

The evidence supporting the purported hotspot’s path is interesting but circumstantial, says Randel Cox, a geologist at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. “I’m still trying to keep an open mind about this [idea], but there are alternate explanations” for the seismic slowdown beneath Kentucky and the Virginia–Massachusetts corridor, he notes.

For instance, seismic vibrations in the region could be scattered by features deep within or below Earth’s crust, such as a ‘crumple zone’ of rocks where one tectonic plate collided with another. Regardless, he adds, researchers need more data, from more than one earthquake, to produce a thorough subterranean map of the eastern United States. - Nature.

PLANETARY TREMORS: 6.2 Magnitude Earthquake Shakes Russia's Far East - Close To China And North Korea!

April 05, 2013 - RUSSIA - An earthquake of 6.2 magnitude was registered in the border area between Russia, China and North Korea, the US Geological Survey said Friday.

The epicenter of the quake was 9km from the Russian village of Zarubino, about 60km northeast of the North Korean city of Aodzhiri and approximately 608 km from the capital Pyongyang. No casualties or damage have been reported.

Image: RT.

The earthquake struck at a depth of 561.9 km.

As the epicenter of the quake is not within North Korea itself, the South Korean Defense Ministry said that the quake did in fact result from natural causes, and not a nuclear test.


Both earthquakes and nuclear tests create seismic waves, and the earthquake comes as Pyongyang has recently threatened to launch a nuclear strike against the US.


On Friday, North Korea warned that it would be unable to guarantee the safety of embassies and international organizations in the country in the event of conflict starting from April 10.
In March, a 6.1-magnitude earthquake shook the northern part of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula in the country’s Far East, and a 6.9 earthquake struck south of the peninsula in late February.

USGS earthquake intensity shakemap.

Neither resulted in causalities or significant damages.

An underground formation in the area known as the Kuril-Kamchatka arc is one of the most seismically active regions in the world.

The USGS says that since 1900, seven massive earthquakes registering 8.3 on the Richter Scale or higher have occurred along the arc. - RT.