Sentences with phrase «how subduction»

[UPDATE: Here's a video explaining how subduction faults generate such potent earthquakes and tsunamis, created by Steven Ward, a geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz:]

Scientists don't know how subduction got started in the first place, but water may be a necessary ingredient.

Not exact matches

To get such a high mountain chain in a subduction zone setting is unusual which adds to the importance of trying to figure out when and how it happened.

But we do not know how the sediments change as they become physically and chemically altered as the sediment section builds up to 4 - 5 km thickness before reaching the subduction zone.

A magnitude - 9.0 earthquake would likely give way along the whole north - south extent of the subduction zone, but it's not well known how far east the shake - producing area would extend, approaching the area beneath major cities such as Seattle and Portland.

«Measuring the strength of olivine is critical to understanding how strong tectonic plates are, which, in turn, matters to how plates break and create subduction zones like those along the Cascadia plate, which runs down the west coast of Canada to the west coast of the United States,» said Warren, a geologist in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment.

But just as in the past, earth scientists still do not understand what triggered plate tectonics in the first place, nor how the first subduction zone was formed.

«We are interested in large - scale geophysical processes, like how plate tectonics initiates and how plates move underneath one another in subduction zones,» said David Goldsby, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

To understand how water affects subduction of the oceanic plate, in which layers of different rock types sink into the mantle, the UO team studied hydrogen isotopes in water contained in tiny blobs of glass trapped in olivine crystals in basalt.

Though a previous geological study by Louise Prockter and Simon Kattenhorn made the case that something like subduction could be happening on Europa, it wasn't clear exactly how that process would work on an icy world..