Hawaii volcano eruption holds clues to predicting similar events elsewhere

Earthquakes triggered by silent slip events on Kı̄lauea volcano, Hawaii

Slow-slip events, or ‘silent earthquakes’, have recently been discovered in a number of subduction zones including the Nankai trough in Japan, Cascadia, and Guerrero in Mexico, but the depths of these events have been difficult to determine from surface deformation measurements. Although it is assumed that these silent earthquakes are located along the plate megathrust, this has not been proved...

Junk DNA holds clues to heart disease

Deleting a non-coding region leads to narrowing of arteries in mice. Janet Fang The risk of developing a form of heart disease has been linked to a region of junk DNA. Researchers have made headway in working out why a section of junk DNA — the 98% or so of the genome that does not code for proteins — raises the risk of at least one form of heart disease. About one in five deaths in the United ...

Volcano-earthquake interaction at Mauna Loa volcano, Hawaii

[1] The activity at Mauna Loa volcano, Hawaii, is characterized by eruptive fissures that propagate into the Southwest Rift Zone (SWRZ) or into the Northeast Rift Zone (NERZ) and by large earthquakes at the basal decollement fault. In this paper we examine the historic eruption and earthquake catalogues, and we test the hypothesis that the events are interconnected in time and space. Earthquake...

Predictability of Volcano Eruption: lessons from a basaltic effusive volcano

Volcano eruption forecast remains a challenging and controversial problem despite the fact that data from volcano monitoring significantly increased in quantity and quality during the last decades. This study uses pattern recognition techniques to quantify the predictability of the 15 Piton de la Fournaise (PdlF) eruptions in the 1988-2001 period using increase of the daily seismicity rate as a...

Fungus Holds Clues to the Evolution of Sex Chromosomes