Everett neighborhood is sinking
Posted on March 17, 2011 at 2:54 PM
Updated Thursday, Mar 17 at 11:11 PM
EVERETT, Wash. -- People living in the Valley View neighborhood of southeast Everett are waiting and watching. A two story house on their block is tilted at a 20 degree angle and could collapse at any moment.
A crack in the earth that first appeared six weeks ago is now threatening about four homes. The City of Everett has "red tagged" the home on Burl which is collapsing. That means no one is allowed near the property.
A "yellow tag" was posted on two other properties where the land is giving way.
A surface slide in the area of Rob and Margaret Lund's house caused their deck and cement patio to completely collapse.
"There is nothing to stop this from happening again and again," said Rob Lund.
Recent heavy rains has caused the sliding to accelerate in the neighborhood. Neighbors said the problem appears to be getting much worse.
"If that house goes, the land will go with it," said Steve Mosman, who lives right next door to the collapsing home. "It would pull our land down with it. We just don't know what is going to happen."
Giant crack in Africa formed in just days
November 2009 by MacGregor Campbell
A crack in the Earth's crust – which could be the forerunner to a new ocean – ripped open in just days in 2005, a new study suggests. The opening, located in the Afar region of Ethiopia, presents a unique opportunity for geologists to study how mid-ocean ridges form.
The crack is the surface component of a continental rift
forming as the Arabian and African plates drift away from one another. It began to open up in September 2005, when a volcano at the northern end of the rift, called Dabbahu, erupted.
forming as the Arabian and African plates drift away from one another. It began to open up in September 2005, when a volcano at the northern end of the rift, called Dabbahu, erupted.The magma inside the volcano did not reach the surface and erupt as a fountain of lava – instead, it was diverted into the continental rift underground. The magma cooled into a wedge-shaped "dike" that was then uplifted, rupturing the surface and creating a 500-metre-long, 60-metre-deep crack.
Using sensor data collected by universities in the region, researchers led by Atalay Ayele of Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia reconstructed the sequence of seismic events that led to the crack's formation. They found that a 60-kilometre-long, 8-metre-wide dike of solidified magma formed in the rift, causing the crack, in a matter of days.
'Stunning' ferocity
Similar dikes in Iceland are typically around 10 kilometres long and 1 metre wide and can take years to form. The new study shows the formation of dikes can occur in larger segments – and over much shorter periods of time – than previously thought.
"The ferocity of what we saw during this episode stunned everyone," saysCynthia Ebinger, a team member at the University of Rochester in New York.
While the Mount Dabbahu rift is still hundreds of kilometres inland, Ebinger says it could continue to widen and lengthen. "As the plates keep spreading apart, it will end up looking like the Red Sea," she says.
New ocean
Eventually it could reach the east coast of Ethiopia and fill up with seawater. "At some point, if that spreading and rifting continues, then that area will be flooded," says Ken Macdonald, a marine geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved with the study.
Ebinger says this won't happen any time soon – it would take around 4 million years for the crack to reach the size of the Red Sea. Other areas in the Afar region are below sea level, however, and could see flooding before that if similar rifting occurs near the coastal volcanoes to the north and east that form a natural levee against the sea.
Macdonald says the process of continental plates spreading apart and filling in with magma is analogous to what happens on the deep seafloor at mid-ocean ridges, which are difficult to study because they lie a few kilometres under water. read more: http://www.truthwinds.com/siterun_data/environment/earth_changes/news.php?q=1300469137
Iceland Lake Disappearing Into New Crack in Earth
Bijal P. Trivedi
for National Geographic Today
for National Geographic Today
October 1, 2001
Icelanders are accustomed to their land being stretched, split, and torn by violent earthquakes and haphazardly rebuilt by exploding volcanoes. But everyone was surprised when a large lake began to disappear into a long fissure created by one of last summer's earthquakes.
The draining lake is an oddity even by Icelandic standards, and has lured hordes of curious onlookers to it barren shores.
The draining lake is an oddity even by Icelandic standards, and has lured hordes of curious onlookers to it barren shores.
Last year, during a leisurely Sunday drive, a geologist noticed a large gash in the landscape about 20 kilometers (13 miles) from Reykjavik and reported it to Clifton. When she arrived she found a fissure—about a foot wide and 400 meters (1,280 feet) long—that led directly into Lake Kleifarvatn and disappeared beneath the water."If you put your ear to the ground, you can hear the lake draining," said geologist Amy Clifton of the Nordic Volcanological Institute in Reykjavik, Iceland. "It sounds like water going down the sink."
Lake Kleifarvatn, which measured about six kilometers (3.7 miles) long and 2.3 kilometers (1.4 miles) wide last year, has shrunk dramatically. Now it is only 3.5 kilometers long and roughly 1.8 kilometers wide, said Clifton.
Kleifarvatn is draining at about one centimeter (one-third of an inch) a day, according to Clifton. "You can almost see the lake level drop," she said.
Summerhouses that were once mere steps from waterfront are now more than a kilometer away from the water's edge. The placid waters have dropped more than four meters in the last year. In their place is a barren lake bed speckled with sulphur-rimmed thermal springs that spit boiling water and mud. read more here:http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/10/1001_lostlake.html
ESA’s Envisat satellite witnesses Earth’s largest crack
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Aerial view of cracks formed in September 2005 |
20 July 2006
Scientists say the recent tear in the Earth's continental crust near the Red Sea in Africa’s Afar desert could isolate Ethiopia and Eritrea from the rest of Africa and could eventually form a new ocean, according to an article published today in the journal Nature.
In September 2005, the Earth split apart along a 60 kilometre section of the East African Rift in Afar, Ethiopia. By monitoring Envisat satellite radar data acquired over the area before and after the event, a team of scientists from the UK, U.S. and Ethiopia has determined the 8-metre rift developed along the 60 kilometre-long stretch of the rift in just three weeks."Because Envisat is routinely acquiring data in areas prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, we were able to make very precise measurements of this rare phenomenon for the first time. The results from Envisat have been vital for guiding our ongoing field studies, and without the satellite data we would have had no idea of the scale of this event," Tim Wright of the University of Leeds and lead author of the study told ESA.
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A 3D view of the rift based on Envisat data |
The use of Envisat data to monitor the rift marks the first time scientists have been able to analyse the spreading process with satellite instruments and shows the process happened suddenly rather than smoothly during large rupture events. These observations also allowed the scientists to determine that the Earth’s tectonic plates split apart due to the injection of magma (molten rock).
"It is clear that the rise of molten rock through the plate is enabling the break up of Africa and Arabia," Wright said.
This process began some thirty million years ago when lava rose from beneath the Earth’s crust and separated the Arabian Peninsula from Africa, creating the Red Sea. This is one of the few areas on Earth where a continent is being actively separated by the ongoing forces of plate tectonics and is believed to be a...
read more here: http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEM14GBUQPE_index_0.html
Deepest cracks of Earth give clues to life in space
July 30th, 2010
The team recovers the hybrid vehicle Nereus aboard the R/V Cape Hatteras during an expedition to the Mid-Cayman Rise in October 2009.
Scientists have discovered the deepest crack on the Earth’s crust on the Caribbean Sea floor, along with signs of life that at that those crushing depths could mean alien life could exist on other planets, NASA said.
A NASA-funded team discovered three hydrothermal vents - fissures in a planet's surface from which geothermally heated water comes – including one about 16,000 feet under the sea along a 100-kilometer (62-mile) stretch called the Mid-Cayman Rise. That stretch of sea bed is an ultra-slow spreading ridge that is part of the tectonic boundary between the North American and Caribbean plates.
Though these hydrothermal vents are far from sunlight and under the extreme pressures of the oceans, some of them get as hot as a convection oven, and scientists say they host bizarre communities that could lead to clues about how life may exist on other planets.
“Most life on Earth is sustained by food chains that begin with sunlight as their energy source. That’s not an option for possible life deep in the ocean of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, prioritized by NASA for future exploration,” said Max Coleman, co-author of the study with NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory.
“However, organisms around the deep vents get energy from the chemicals in hydrothermal fluid, a scenario we think is similar to the seafloor of Europa, and this work will help us understand what we might find when we search for life there.”
The team’s findings were published in last week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
read more here: http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/30/search-for-life-in-space-starts-in-deepest-cracks-of-earth/
(Colombo-Lankapuvath) Public in the Kuchchaweli, Trincomalee are warned to not to reach the area where the earth is cracked. National Building Research Organization (NBRO) Official R.M.S Bandara said there was no need to panic over the cracks, but public should refrain from reaching the area as the soil of the particular area is sinking.He further said that according to the determination of the research team, pressure that mounted due to the under ground saturation of water in its sand layer has caused the cracks.
During investigations people in the Kuchchaweli area have reported to officials that earlier there has been an abandon canal in close proximity to the cracked line. Therefore, officials predict that the soil may have become smooth with the effect of all the natural forces.
During investigations people in the Kuchchaweli area have reported to officials that earlier there has been an abandon canal in close proximity to the cracked line. Therefore, officials predict that the soil may have become smooth with the effect of all the natural forces.
read more here: http://www.lankapuvath.lk/index.php/latest-news/general/11801--trinco-earth-crack-no-stepping-
In 2005, the earth cracked open in Ethiopia. Two volcanic eruptions shook the desert, and a 35-mile-long rift opened in the land, measuring 20 feet wide in some places. Now a new study adds weight to the argument that the opening of this crack marks the first step in the formation of a newsea that may eventually separate East Africa from the rest of the continent. Says lead researcher Atalay Ayele: “The ocean’s formation is happening slowly, likely to take a few million years. It will stretch from the Afar depression (straddling Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti) down to Mozambique” [ABC News].The study, to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, explains that the seismic movements observed in Ethiopia are very similar to the changes wrought by faults and fissures on the seafloor, where the processes that move tectonic plates usually begin.
Seismic data from 2005 shows that the rift opened in a matter of days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began “unzipping” the rift in both directions, the researchers explained in a statement today. “We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this” [LiveScience], says study coauthor Cindy Ebinger.
Read More Here: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/11/04/a-crack-opens-in-the-ethiopian-landscape-preparing-the-way-for-a-new-sea/
Tremors Point to a Stressed-Out Stretch of the San Andreas Fault
In a central California area with a history of dramatic earthquakes, researchers have detected a worrisome amount of seismic activity deep underground. The researchers looked at data from 76 monitoring stations along the central California stretch of the San Andreas fault, and found that almost 2,200 “deep earth tremors” had shaken the earth since 2001, a span of time that included two earthquakes. Tremors increased around the time of those two quakes in 2003 and 2004, and rates have remained high since then. “What’s surprising is that the activity has not gone down to its old level” [Reuters], says study coauthor Robert Nadeau. It’s possible that the continuing tremors could presage another quake, researchers say.Tremors vibrate quietly and can continue for days. Tremors also tend to happen in a deeper, softer part of the Earth’s crust, rather than in the upper part typically thought to generate earthquakes [Los Angeles Times]. Researchers don’t yet know whether tremors are accurate predictors of the larger earthquakes that can convulse the earth’s surface, but Nadeau says they may be a symptom of stress building up on a fault. “We’ve shown that earthquakes can stimulate tremors next to a locked (fault) zone, but we don’t yet have evidence that this tells us anything about future quakes,” Nadeau said…. “But if earthquakes trigger tremors, the pressure that stimulates tremors may also stimulate earthquakes” [San Francisco Chronicle].
In the study, published in Science, researchers report that the highest concentration of tremors were found around the small town of Cholame, which lies just 45 miles southeast of the epicenter of the 1857 Fort Tejon quake at Morgan Peak. [That 7.8-magnitude] temblor, one of the greatest earthquakes in California history, caused little damage because the region was virtually uninhabited at the time, but the fault has generated no significant movement since then and is considered locked for 185 miles to the south. Cholame stands just at the northern end of that locked segment of the San Andreas [San Francisco Chronicle]. “Locked” fault zones are those where the tectonic plates can’t slip past each other but are instead jammed, causing stress to build up.
Read more here : http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/07/10/tremors-point-to-a-stressed-out-stretch-of-the-san-andreas-fault/
| 10/6/2010 Earth crack a mystery | |||
EagleHerald staff writer BIRCH CREEK - One day the land was flat and filled with trees shooting straight into the air. Twenty-four hours later there's a 600-foot-long crack, 4-feet deep twisting its way through the woods - and those vertical trees are now pointed 30 degrees left and right where the earth has mounded 15 feet high. No, it's not a disaster movie; it's what happened Monday at the home of Eileen Heider on Bay de Noc Road in Birch Creek. Heider was sitting in her recliner watching TV at about 8:30 that morning. "The chair shook for a few seconds and I thought the spring in the chair went," she said. Heider heard a noise at the same time. She checked her chair and around the house inside and out but couldn't find anything unusual. Heider wasn't alone. A neighbor across the road told her she heard a boom while taking a shower and that her husband was leaning against the washing machine and said he felt it move, even though it wasn't running. Another neighbor said he heard a boom and closed his window thinking it was thunder but then noticed the sky was clear. The next day Heider's friend, Doug Salewski, found a hole in the ground and a 200-yard crevasse a short ways away which wasn't there before. Heider went to investigate and said the crack was three-feet wide and about five-feet deep in spots. "The trees on one side are kind of tilted and on the other side are tilted the opposite way," she said. The hole found by her friend was dry so she didn't think it was caused by rain, even though some members of her family did. "My kids and different ones that came over said maybe it was because of so much rain and there was a buildup of pressure underneath." Heider call authorities and Michigan State Trooper Paul Anderson from the Stephenson Post came out to take a look. "There's no gas line or anything, I have no answers to it," he said. "It heaved the ground 10 to 15 feet. I mean the ground used to be flat and now it's just heaved, it heaved the entire ground." Anderson said he'd follow up with phone calls to geologists at Michigan Tech. read more here: |
Friday, October 8, 2010 - 13:49
A large crack suddenly appeared after what seemed like an earthquake in Menominee Township of Michigan, US. There are a few videos of the crack but this one seems like the best.
Locals or authorities dont know what it is and have also contacted experts that can figure out why such a massive crack appeared.
No one knows if it was a earthquake, volcano or what might be beneath and causing also the earth to lift up at places.
There is no fault line in that area so a fault line theory cannot explain what is happening there.
Looks like something out of a horror movie.
Here is the video:
update:
Update:
NEW CONTINENT
Meet the New Continent
In only a million years we'll have an eighth: East Africa.
From the October 2006 issue; published online October 31, 2006
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| During the next one million years, the Ethiopian rift will extend from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. When it does, the Horn of Africa will become a new continent. (Image courtesy of NASA) |
Last September, the ground in part of northern Ethiopia suddenly dropped 10 feet and split apart so quickly that the gaping hole swallowed camels and goats. Over the next three weeks, the earth quaked 160 times, opening up a 25-foot-wide crack a third of a mile long.
Using satellite radar data, Tim Wright, a geophysicist at the University of Leeds in England, has pieced together exactly how the gap got started. As the African and Arabian tectonic plates drift apart, the crust between them weakens. "Magma forming at the base of the crust periodically drips up, like a lava lamp, and pools in a chamber—like a balloon slowly inflating," Wright says. "When the balloon reaches a critical pressure, it pops." That pop caused a contained volcanic explosion, injecting molten rock into a 35-mile-long elongated bubble just a few miles underground and forcing a crack in the surface above.
As the plates continue to drift apart, tension increases until the whole process happens again. "Eventually, we think it will connect to the Red Sea, and water will flood in," says Wright.
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