Topic
Study of earthquake sources, seismic wave propagation and fault slip, here focused on core-reflected ScS phases from the 2011 Tohoku-Oki mainshock.
University of Florence geologists link quakes along nearly all of the 1,200-km Apennines to a front where deep crust peels into the mantle. One moving front would account for both the stretching and the squeezing, and for where Italy's quakes are likely to strike.
Reality
Stefano Tavani's group combined Italy's earthquake record with GPS and satellite ground motion to argue that the lower crust beneath the Apennines is peeling away and sinking, a late-stage process he calls unzipping.
Reality
A new model puts up to 6.2 miles of sediment under downtown and sharpens the basin's edges, the geometry a USGS seismologist credits for Santa Monica's unexpected damage in 1994. It is an input to shaking simulations.
Reality
The seismograms had been sitting in archives since 1990. What changed is that a classifier could read 174,929 faint PKP precursors out of more than two million records, enough to join isolated patches into belts.
Reality
A study led by the University of Chicago's Sunyoung Park attributes the shift to core-reflected ScS waves arriving 13 minutes after the 2011 Tohoku-Oki mainshock. The motion is small; the mechanism is new.
Reality