Robin George Andrews – Quanta Magazine

The Search for What Shook the Earth for Nine Days Straight

Robin George Andrews — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 18:00:39 +0000

On September 16, 2023, the world began to rumble. A gargantuan rock-ice avalanche tumbled into the deep waters of a fjord in eastern Greenland, unleashing a megatsunami whose initial waves reached a height of 200 meters. The waves scoured the walls of the fjord before flowing into the open sea. Even for this avalanche-prone corner of Greenland, the collapse and subsequent megatsunami were shocking...

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Inside Scientists’ Life-Saving Prediction of the Iceland Eruption

Robin George Andrews — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 15:27:49 +0000

On November 10, 2023, Kristín Jónsdóttir, head of the Icelandic Meteorological Office’s department of volcano research, was having a rare day off. “It was my 50th birthday,” she said. Then everything began to shake. She would spend the day staring at her phone, watching the earthquakes bloom across maps of Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula. The peninsula experiences fissure eruptions...

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The Scientist Who Decodes the Songs of Undersea Volcanoes

Robin George Andrews — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 15:17:27 +0000

We often think of volcanoes as skyscraping marvels, but these portals to the geologic underworld also reside underwater. Unfortunately, submarine volcanoes are trickier to study than their terrestrial siblings. But you would be hard-pressed to find anyone more enchanted by them — and more stubbornly determined to study them — than Jackie Caplan-Auerbach. A volcanologist at Western Washington...

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These Moons Are Dark and Frozen. So How Can They Have Oceans?

Robin George Andrews — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:49:29 +0000

For most of humankind’s existence, Earth was the only known ocean-draped world, seemingly unlike any other cosmic isle. But in 1979, NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft flew by Jupiter. Its moon Europa, a frozen realm, was decorated with grooves and fractures — hints that there might be something dynamic beneath its surface. “After Voyager, people suspected that Europa was weird and might have an ocean,”...

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Scientists Unravel How the Tonga Volcano Caused Worldwide Tsunamis

Robin George Andrews — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 13:35:21 +0000

In August 1883, a mountainous island in Indonesia named Krakatau, or Krakatoa, self-destructed. Episodic volcanic eruptions crescendoed in an explosion that sent debris 80 kilometers high and smothered 800,000 square kilometers of Earth’s surface in corrosive ash. As much of the island blasted apart and splashed into the sea, a tsunami rose up and slammed into the nearby islands of Java and...

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