Our planet is a pretty wild place. We may not notice it every day but it is constantly in motion. From earthquakes to volcanic eruptions, this world is shifting and changing daily. Scientists have spent years studying these changes and have recorded some pretty remarkable footage for us all to enjoy.
According to Woburn, “Pretend that you’re an alien in a spacecraft above Earth. You are looking down and watching the pulse of planet Earth. The breath, the respiration.”
That’s what Elizabeth Cottrell, a research geologist at the National Museum of Natural History and the director of its Global Volcanism Program, imagines when she looks at a new visualization of Earth’s eruptions, earthquakes and gas emissions. As she rotates the globe with a click of her mouse, blue dots signifying tremors and red triangles for volcanoes flare up and fade away, carving the planet’s surface in predictable patterns. The animation emits a “ping” with each earthshaking event.
The data for the animation comes from Cottrell’s program and the U.S. Geological Survey, as well as remote sensing satellites operated by NASA. According to Cottrell, the “E3 App” (three “E”s for eruptions, earthquakes and emissions) is the first visualization to consolidate all three data sets.
“That’s where the scientific power of a database like this comes in,” she said. “Because you can start to look at the correlations.”
For example, researchers who attempt to develop methods for forecasting quakes and volcanic eruptions might look at the app and find patterns that are difficult to recognize when looking at plain old numbers on a page. Forms of tectonic activity are almost always linked – earthquakes can trigger eruptions; movement of magma to the surface will send tremors through the Earth; some erupting volcanoes spew out huge plumes of sulfur and carbon, while others quietly belch gases all the time. The visualization aims to highlight links between the different phenomena that could prompt research on earthquake intervals, eruption size, tsunami probabilities and other characteristics of these events.
Findings from the Deep Carbon Observatory, a global research program aimed at understanding the way carbon cycles through the Earth, suggest that measuring the ratio of gas to carbon around volcanoes could help predict when they will erupt.
“Potentially, we can now see an eruption coming just by looking at gas emissions,” geochemist J. Maarten de Moor, the lead author of a new study in the Journal of Geophysical Research, said in a statement.
Not shown on the app are years of data on quakes and eruptions before 1960, which the Global Volcanism Program has been collecting for almost 50 years. Using scientific observations, witness testimony, historical accounts and information from the geologic record, they are trying build a database of the planet’s volcanic and earthquake activity since the beginning of the Holocene Epoch some 10,000 years ago.
We live in an incredible world and we are witness to God’s glory on a daily basis, but we rarely stop to think of the raw power of our planet until we see it with our own eyes.
Source: Woburn