by Annie Ropeik - KUCB, Unalaska
Earthquakes are an almost hourly occurrence in the Aleutian Islands. But most are too tiny to feel, and even the bigger ones are usually over in seconds. Just last week, a 4.7M quake went all but unnoticed in Unalaska.
But there’s another type of earthquake that runs deeper than those daily events: a slow earthquake. That’s what scientists are now looking for underneath the Aleutians.
Abhijit Ghosh is a geophysicist at the University of California Riverside. He says low earthquakes are deep, drawn-out tremors that can last for weeks, months or even years.
“So it releases that energy — magnitude seven or eight, however large it is — but over a long period of time, so we don’t really feel the ground shaking,” he says.
Ghosh wants to know... Read more