Sentences with phrase «slow earthquakes»

They found a total of eight such slow earthquakes in the same general vicinity.

Slow earthquakes don't shake the surface, but may stress the neighboring locked fault.

But another study by researchers in the United States and Taiwan found a similar association between slow earthquakes — which take places over hours or even days — and tropical cyclones in Taiwan.

Now, however, a team of geophysicists reports that so - called slow earthquakes stir deep below the Pacific Northwest about every 14 months.

One explanation is that Taiwan undergoes slow earthquakes, in which crustal faults slip over hours or days, rather than seconds, creating no seismic judders.

«Until slow earthquakes were observed 10 to 15 years ago, conventional wisdom held that faults either released energy slowly and steadily by creeping, or would store tectonic stress until they failed catastrophically,» moving at a rate of about 3 feet per second, says Demian Saffer, a geophysicist at Pennsylvania State University.

But the CWU team points out that many slow temblors may take place in the 500 or so years between great quakes; this makes it unlikely that any single slow earthquake is going to be a meaningful precursor.

Yet slower, more continuous deformations — such as those caused by Earth tides or by slow earthquakes — are sometimes difficult to detect using large - scale techniques like GPS or seismic sensors.

«These signals resemble Earth tremor that occurs in association with slow earthquakes on tectonic faults in the lower crust,» Johnson said.

They found that slow earthquake areas and the ultra-slow-velocity layers cluster together, and that regions of non-volcanic tremors are adjacent to those clusters.

Now a team of researchers, led by Teh - Ru Alex Song of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, has found that an anomalous layer at the top of a subducting plate coincides with the locations of slow earthquakes and non-volcanic tremors.

The scientists also examined the locations where slow earthquakes and non-volcanic tremors have occurred.

Bouchon says that monitoring the activity of these so - called slow earthquakes could be the key to detecting the accelerations in tectonic activity that hint at an impending catastrophic quake.

Now a team led by Chichung Liu of the Academica Sinica in Taipei says these slow earthquakes can be triggered by typhoons.

But so far, no one can explain why these slow earthquakes happen or what they portend.

Geologists are keen to understand whether these «slow earthquakes» are merely leaks of tectonic pressure, like the hiss of air from a punctured tire, or warning signs of a more dangerous, fast - moving temblor.

It's too early to tell what effect the slow earthquakes might have on the risk of a blockbuster shakeup.

Yet in 1999, a slow earthquake struck this part of the fault.

But Dragert warns that the slow earthquakes might one day rupture the locked zone if it's close to a critical threshold.

Slow earthquakes, also called silent earthquakes, take days, weeks, or even months to release pent - up energy instead of seconds or minutes as in normal earthquakes.