scholarly journals Unknown Tsunami Trigger Hides Along a Creeping Aleutian Fault

Eos ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cody Sullivan

A seismically quiet part of the Aleutian Subduction Zone may have caused tsunamis in the past—and may cause future tsunamis that could travel across the Pacific Ocean.

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Parker ◽  
Clifford Ollier

AbstractOver the past decades, detailed surveys of the Pacific Ocean atoll islands show no sign of drowning because of accelerated sea-level rise. Data reveal that no atoll lost land area, 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, and only 11.4% of islands contracted. The Pacific Atolls are not being inundated because the sea level is rising much less than was thought. The average relative rate of rise and acceleration of the 29 long-term-trend (LTT) tide gauges of Japan, Oceania and West Coast of North America, are both negative, −0.02139 mm yr−1and −0.00007 mm yr−2respectively. Since the start of the 1900s, the sea levels of the Pacific Ocean have been remarkably stable.


PeerJ ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. e1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio Tusso ◽  
Kerstin Morcinek ◽  
Catherine Vogler ◽  
Peter J. Schupp ◽  
Ciemon F. Caballes ◽  
...  

Population outbreaks of the corallivorous crown-of-thorns seastar (COTS),Acanthaster ‘planci’ L., are among the most important biological disturbances of tropical coral reefs. Over the past 50 years, several devastating outbreaks have been documented around Guam, an island in the western Pacific Ocean. Previous analyses have shown that in the Pacific Ocean, COTS larval dispersal may be geographically restricted to certain regions. Here, we assess the genetic structure of Pacific COTS populations and compared samples from around Guam with a number of distant localities in the Pacific Ocean, and focused on determining the degree of genetic structure among populations previously considered to be isolated. Using microsatellites, we document substantial genetic structure between 14 localities from different geographical regions in the Pacific Ocean. Populations from the 14 locations sampled were found to be structured in three significantly differentiated groups: (1) all locations immediately around Guam, as well as Kingman Reef and Swains Island; (2) Japan, Philippines, GBR and Vanuatu; and (3) Johnston Atoll, which was significantly different from all other localities. The lack of genetic differentiation between Guam and extremely distant populations from Kingman Reef and Swains Island suggests potential long-distance dispersal of COTS in the Pacific.


2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. n/a-n/a ◽  
Author(s):  
Nazlı Olgun ◽  
Svend Duggen ◽  
Peter Leslie Croot ◽  
Pierre Delmelle ◽  
Heiner Dietze ◽  
...  

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. A74-A74
Author(s):  
J. F. L.

In the past year and a half, seven Pali High students have died violently in incidents involving alcohol, drugs or cars. The school now has what may be the first Alcoholic Anonymous chapter on an American high-school campus. This is hardly your tough inner-city school. Pali High sits on a privileged plateau overlooking the Pacific Ocean in a community of mostly wealthy, welleducated parents. It is not one of those enclaves of old money, but a suburb of achievers—doctors, lawyers, entertainment figures—parents who work hard and, yes, often play hard. It is a place where students are given fast cars on their 16th birthdays and have easy access to drink and drugs. There are suburbs like this all over the nation. . . . The students I talked to said there is absolutely no school spirit, zero. They didn't have much use for Pacific Palisades either, they said, no community loyalty. They dismissed it as a bland, moneyed place where no one had roots, one of those end-of-the-rainbow Western suburbs where dreams were supposed to come true and people were angry when they didn't, a place where there was nothing to do on weekends but party, or "rage" as they call it. . . "I just don't think there were enough limits," he said. "Everybody's parents were trying to be so cool. . ."


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Han ◽  
Yongyun Hu ◽  
Yonggang Liu

<p>A set of deep-time climate simulations each 10Ma years from 250Ma to PI are conducted by using the NCAR-CESM1.2, for understanding the evolution of the ocean monsoon regions driven by tectonic dynamics over the past 250 million years and exploring its variation mechanisms. In recent years, scientists have proposed the concept of a global monsoon system, which includes not only typical monsoon regions (such as the African monsoon region and South Asian monsoon region), but also the atypical Northwest Pacific Ocean monsoon region. Research on the ocean monsoon is very limited, especially in the field of paleoclimate. The results in this paper show that the horizontal gradients of the thickness of the ocean mixed layer may be more important for the formation of the ocean monsoon than land-sea thermal contrast, which is confirmed by the aquaplanet simulations with various gradients of the ocean mixed-layer thickness. Near the Pacific monsoon region in the northern hemisphere, the thickness of the ocean mixed layer has obvious meridional and zonal gradients, which will correspond to the meridional and zonal thermal contrasts. In addition, there are obvious seasonal reversals in the gradients of the ocean mixed-layer thickness in summer and winter, and the corresponding longitudinal and zonal thermal contrast produce seasonal reversals. Over the past 250 million years, the thickness of the ocean mixed layer on the east side of the Pacific Ocean Basin in the Northern Hemisphere has deepened, and the corresponding ocean monsoon area on the east side of the Pacific Ocean has decreased. The changes in the thickness of the ocean mixed layer are closely related to the changes in the surface wind field. Examining the changes in the atmospheric circulations, we find that the Pacific subtropical high strengthens and extends from east to the west bank of the ocean basin, where the atmospheric low-level anticyclonic circulation causes the ocean surface layer to converge and sink and thus causes the ocean mixed layer to deepen. The changes in the Pacific subtropical high are related to changes in the continental monsoon region. Since the 170Ma, the Pangea supercontinent splits up, causing the supercontinent's inland water vapor to increase, the land monsoon area to increase, and the ocean monsoon area to decrease. According to the "monsoon-desert mechanism" of Rodwell and Hoskins, we can understand the relationship between the strengthening of land monsoon condensation heating and the formation of subtropical high over the western ocean.</p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 20160717 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikita V. Zelenkov

Modern parrots (crown Psittaciformes) are a species-rich group of mostly tropical and subtropical birds with a very limited fossil record. A partial tarsometatarsus from the late Early Miocene of Siberia (Baikal Lake) is the first pre-Quaternary find of crown Psittaciformes in Asia (and Siberia in particular) and is also the northern-most find of this bird order worldwide. This find documents a broad geographical distribution of parrots during the warmest phase of the Miocene (the so-called ‘Miocene Climatic Optimum’), which has implications for the historical biogeography of Psittaciformes. The presence of parrots on both sides of the Pacific Ocean at the end of the Early Miocene implies a (most probably eastwards) trans-Beringian dispersal which likely took place about 16–18 Ma. The broad Eurasian distribution of parrots in the past further supports a hypothesis that ancestors of modern genera Coracopsis and Agapornis could reach Africa from Eurasia.


Tsunami ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 173-188
Author(s):  
James Goff ◽  
Walter Dudley

The 1960 Chilean earthquake, the largest earthquake in recorded history, ruptured nearly 620 miles of seafloor, generated a tsunami well over 50 ft (15 m) high in Chile, and moved the entire country to the west in a matter of minutes as the ground shook. The tsunami following the earthquake caused Pacific-wide destruction. This chapter charts the progress of the tsunami across the Pacific Ocean, beginning with tsunami survivor stories from Chile and then moving to the Moai of Easter Island, bad decisions in Hawaii, and the unwelcome surprise of this distantly generated event for Japan. This was an ocean-wide disaster that provides important lessons regarding what happened in the past and what will happen in the future.


2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (5) ◽  
pp. 1292-1297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tristan J. Horner ◽  
Helen M. Williams ◽  
James R. Hein ◽  
Mak A. Saito ◽  
Kevin W. Burton ◽  
...  

Biological carbon fixation is limited by the supply of Fe in vast regions of the global ocean. Dissolved Fe in seawater is primarily sourced from continental mineral dust, submarine hydrothermalism, and sediment dissolution along continental margins. However, the relative contributions of these three sources to the Fe budget of the open ocean remains contentious. By exploiting the Fe stable isotopic fingerprints of these sources, it is possible to trace distinct Fe pools through marine environments, and through time using sedimentary records. We present a reconstruction of deep-sea Fe isotopic compositions from a Pacific Fe−Mn crust spanning the past 76 My. We find that there have been large and systematic changes in the Fe isotopic composition of seawater over the Cenozoic that reflect the influence of several, distinct Fe sources to the central Pacific Ocean. Given that deeply sourced Fe from hydrothermalism and marginal sediment dissolution exhibit the largest Fe isotopic variations in modern oceanic settings, the record requires that these deep Fe sources have exerted a major control over the Fe inventory of the Pacific for the past 76 My. The persistence of deeply sourced Fe in the Pacific Ocean illustrates that multiple sources contribute to the total Fe budget of the ocean and highlights the importance of oceanic circulation in determining if deeply sourced Fe is ever ventilated at the surface.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 897-910
Author(s):  
Go Urakawa ◽  
◽  

The Great East Japan Earthquake occurred on March 11, 2011. Tohoku region, off the coast of the Pacific Ocean, was severely damaged by the tsunami, and all of Japan was affected. Recently, torrential and guerrilla rains have been frequently occurring in Uji, Kyoto, which suffered massive damage on August 13, 2013. Soma, Fukushima, and Uji made tremendous efforts for supporting victims’ recovery by using spatial information and GIS. These successful efforts indicate that they had been using spatial information efficiently in their daily operations. This paper describes the learnings from the past efforts in disaster affected areas and discusses how these areas had been using spatial information for efficient daily operations. The paper makes suggestions to build a GIS-based information system with seamless interaction between daily operations and disaster management, and introduces new challenges faced by Kitakyushu, Fukuoka using spatial information based on cloud computing network for regional disaster resilient societies.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio Tusso ◽  
Kerstin Morcinek ◽  
Catherine Vogler ◽  
Peter J Schupp ◽  
Ciemon F Caballes ◽  
...  

Population outbreaks of the corallivorous crown-of-thorns seastar (COTS), Acanthaster ‘planci’ L., are among the most important biological disturbances of tropical coral reefs. Over the past 50 years, several devastating outbreaks have been documented around Guam, an island in the western Pacific Ocean. Previous analyses have shown that in the Pacific Ocean, COTS larval dispersal may be geographically restricted to certain regions. Here, we assess the genetic structure of Pacific COTS populations and compared samples from around Guam with a number of distant localities in the Pacific Ocean, and focused on determining the degree of genetic structure among populations previously considered to be isolated. Using microsatellites, we document substantial genetic structure between 14 localities from different geographical regions in the Pacific Ocean. Populations from the 14 locations sampled were found to be structured in three significantly differentiated groups: (1) all locations immediately around Guam, as well as Kingman Reef and Swains Island; (2) Japan, Philippines, GBR and Vanuatu; and (3) Johnston Atoll, which was significantly different from all other localities. The most stark divergence of these groupings from previous studies is the lack of genetic differentiation between Guam and extremely distant populations from Kingman Reef and Swains Island. These findings suggest potential long-range dispersal of COTS in the Pacific, and highlight the importance of ecological determinants in shaping genetic structure.


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