In 2004, a devastating tsunami struck coastlines around the Indian Ocean. In a study of the long-term recovery of the city of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, we found that reconstruction aid provided mostly near the coast, combined with many people's preferences to move to safer areas instead, has had the unintended consequence whereby the poor have become disproportionately exposed to coastal hazards.
When searching for life, scientists begin by looking for the key element that sustains it: fresh water. Although today’s Martian surface is barren, frozen and inhospitable, a trail of evidence points to a once warmer, wetter planet, where water flowed freely. The mystery of what happened to this water is long-standing and unsolved. However, our new research, published on 21 December in Nature, suggests that this water is now locked in Martian rocks.
On 25 April 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Nepal, destroying buildings and infrastructure across 31 of Nepal’s 70 districts. Approximately 9,000 people lost their lives to the earthquake that day, 22,000 suffered from injuries, and eight million were affected. I arrived in Kathmandu one week after the quake to support the government of Nepal in various response and recovery activities.
Our Earth is warming. In fact, the planet’s average temperature has risen by 0.6°C over the past century, and is projected to rise another 2 to 6°C over the next hundred years. Small changes in the average temperature of the planet can translate to large and potentially dangerous shifts in climate and weather.
New research from the Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS) recently published in Science introduces an exciting new technique for discerning the strength of rocks in the earth’s continental lower crust. The method we developed allows us to make inferences about the properties of rocks where they are buried. Our study also provides the first low-frequency tomographic image of rheological properties beneath Kyushu, Japan. Tomography allows us to see the internal properties of the rock, section by section.
New research from the Earth Observatory of Singapore and Victoria University of Wellington has provided in-depth information into how the Earth’s mantle deep beneath the central North Island of New Zealand is melting.
A new study from the Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS) sheds new light on the 2015 Sabah earthquake. Published on 9 March 2017 in Geoscience Letters, the research paper provides a complete analysis of the quake and explains how it triggered the deadly landslides that killed seven children.
Parkfield, population 18, sits on the San Andreas Fault in central California. Besides a café and grazing cattle, the town hosts a dense array of seismic instruments that measure tremors deep below Earth’s surface. The small quakes repeat every few days and act as a model for similar faults around the world.
In a paper published in Geology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Geological Society of America, Associate Professor Fidel Costa from the Earth Observatory of Singapore and colleagues Helena Albert and Joan Martí from the Central Geophysical Observatory in Spain found that monogenetic eruptions could be anticipated by a combination of seismic and petrological observations.
