Quake activity along the San Andreas fault is picking up

After a few hours of quiescence on the evening of 3 January, very weak emissions of incandescent material (probably mostly hot gas with little or no solid material) resumed from the pit crater located on the lower E flank of Etna's Southeast Crater cone. Later that evening intense incandescence from the pit crater was reported by observers in the village of S. Alfio on the E flank of Etna. The emissions continued on 4 January at a rate of 4-6 events per hour, producing small plumes that appeared as thermal anomalies in thermal video footage. Activity ceased in the afternoon. Very weak emissions of incandescent material (probably again mostly hot gas) were observed on 5 January at the same rate as the previous day. A camera recorded white vapor plumes occasionally accompanied by some grayish-brown ash. Weak, intermittent incandescence from the pit crater was observed at night during 5-6 January. Emissions on 6 January occurred at a frequency of 3-4 events per hour, producing small plumes seen in thermal camera footage. That same day, intense degassing occurred from the W vent of Bocca Nuova (BN-1), and from the Northeast Crater, where pulsating emissions produced mushroom-shaped vapor plumes.

Starting in the late evening of 11 January, the seismic network recorded a slight increase in volcanic tremor amplitude. The amplitude peaked early on 12 January, and the source of the tremor shifted from a location N of the Northeast Crater towards the Southeast Crater. Weak Strombolian activity from the pit crater accompanied these changes on 11 January, and gradually became more intense on 12 January.

RussiaToday | January 13, 2011 | 49 likes, 1 dislikes

Europe's highest active volcano, Mount Etna has begun spewing lava again. The Sicilian volcano sent bright orange balls of lava straight up into the air and a steady glowing orange flow ran down its side. According to the ANSA new agency, flames went hundreds of metres into the air and could be seen from the nearby towns of Catania and Taormina.

The Army Depot is located in Mineral County Nevada approximately 135 miles southeast of Reno and is contiguous to, and surrounds the Walker Lake -- looking north community of Hawthorne, Nevada (Site Map). Hawthorne has a resident population of about 4,000 people. Both the community of Hawthorne and the Depot are located next to Walker Lake (Walker Lake is a unique desert lake -- it is one of only five relatively fresh, deep water desert lakes in the world supporting a substantial fishery).

The depot covers an area of approximately 150,000 acres, its mission is to receive, issue, store renovate, inspect, demilitarize and dispose of conventional ammunition.

The Depot contains over 2,600 buildings or structures, of which 2,200 are explosive storage magazines. It is considered the largest conventional munitions depot in the western hemisphere, if not the entire world.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, in conjunction with the Department of Defense, tested a nuclear bomb 28 miles southeast of Fallon, at 5 p.m. on October 26, 1963.

Named “Shoal”, the 12.5 kiloton nuclear weapon was part of the “Vela Uniform” test shots. The weapon exploded at a depth of 1,205 feet below ground surface.[6] The site is located in Gote Flat in the Sand Springs Range.

Access to the Project Shoal Area is unrestricted.[7] Access to the area is by Highway 50, Nevada Highway 839, then to an improved gravel road to the site.

January 12, 2011
Jack Oliver, Who Proved Continental Drift, Dies at 87
By KENNETH CHANG

Jack Oliver, whose studies of earthquakes provided convincing proof that Earth’s continents are constantly moving, died last Wednesday at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Cornelia Oliver.

The idea of continental drift, that Earth’s crust is slowly shifting and moving, had been proposed by the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener in 1912, but most of the scientific community regarded it with skepticism and often derision through much of the 20th century.

In the 1960s, scientists set up seismometers across the world, allowing them to measure and record the slightest shakings almost anywhere. In 1964, Dr. Oliver and a former graduate student of his, Bryan Isacks, went to the South Pacific to set up seismic stations on the island nations of Tonga and Fiji.

They puzzled over waves from deep earthquakes, emanating as far down as 400 miles below the surface, before realizing that part of the seafloor was being bent downward and pushed into Earth’s interior.

In 1968, Dr. Oliver, Dr. Isacks and another former graduate student of Dr. Oliver, Lynn Sykes, wrote a paper, “Seismology and the New Global Tectonics,” that put together earthquake evidence from around the world that made a convincing case that continental drift — now called plate tectonics — was indeed occurring.

“All of the pieces suddenly made sense if you believed plate tectonics was going on,” said Larry D. Brown, a professor of geological sciences at Cornell who was a former student of Dr. Oliver. “Jack was a great integrator. He was one who would stand back and say there’s a bigger picture here.”

John Ertle Oliver was born Sept. 26, 1923, in Massillon, Ohio. In high school, he played on Massillon’s championship football team, which was coached by Paul Brown, who went on to become a Hall of Fame coach of the Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals in the National Football League.

He continued playing football at Columbia. From 1943 to 1946, he interrupted his studies to serve in the United States Naval Construction Battalion, commonly known as the Seabees, in Hawaii and the Philippines. He returned to Columbia to finish his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics and then earned a doctoral degree in geophysics in 1953.

After finishing his doctorate, Dr. Oliver remained at Columbia. While looking at seismograms recorded at Columbia’s Lamont Geological Observatory outside New York City, Dr. Oliver noticed a long-period seismic wave that was generated not by an earthquake, but by a nuclear test in Nevada.

“Even the professionals who were in the business of detecting explosions” were surprised to learn that a nuclear explosion in Nevada could be detected at a seismic station in New York State, Dr. Oliver recalled in an oral history recorded by the American Institute of Physics in 1997. “So overnight I became the world’s expert in this subject.”

That led to his serving as an adviser to the White House on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1958 and 1959 and as a delegate to the negotiations in Geneva.

Dr. Oliver moved to Cornell in 1971 to lead the geological sciences department. The work on plate tectonics in the 1960s had centered on the ocean seafloor, so at Cornell Dr. Oliver shifted his focus to the continents. He helped establish the Consortium for Continental Reflection Profiling, or Cocorp, which took advantage of oil exploration techniques for geology research.

Dr. Oliver was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was a past president of the Seismological Society of America and the Geological Society of America. He wrote or co-wrote more than 200 scientific papers.

In addition to his daughter Cornelia, of Los Angeles, Dr. Oliver is survived by another daughter, Amy Mascolo of Doylestown, Pa.; a brother, William, of Massillon; and six grandchildren. His wife, Gertrude, died in 2003.

In his 1998 autobiography, “Shakespeare Got It Wrong: It’s Not ‘to Be,’ It’s ‘to Do,’ ” Dr. Oliver indulged in a fondness for limericks, interspersing them between chapters. Here is one:

The youth wondered what he should be.

His prof said, “You’re missing the key.

Life’s not to be, but to do.

Pick a task, follow through.

You’ll live ever after most happily.”