Geology Department
| Title | Authored on | Link to edit Content | |
|---|---|---|---|
| WWU's Melissa Rice celebrates one-year anniversary of rover Mars landing with speaking events at Museum of Flight | 2022-02-18 | ||
| The Tonga eruption explained, from tsunami warnings to sonic booms | Just a few weeks ago, a submarine volcano identifiable by two small uninhabitable islands in the Kingdom of Tonga began to erupt. Its outburst initially seemed innocuous, with ashen plumes and moderate explosions that few people living outside the archipelago noticed. But in the past 24… |
2022-01-18 | |
| Research Recap for Nov. 8: Psychology faculty article about the effects of climate change on nomadic herding and research on Mount Baker’s magma storage | 2021-11-08 | ||
| Research Recap for Oct. 29: Ecological work in the Gulf of Alaska, the geology of the North Olympic Fault zone, and more | 2021-10-29 | ||
| WWU's Melissa Rice co-publishes new article in 'Science' about the initial discoveries of the Mars Perseverance rover | 2021-10-11 | ||
| Perseverance’s first major successes on Mars – an update from mission scientists | In the short time since NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, it’s already made history. At the moment, Mars and the Earth are on opposite sides of the Sun, and the two planets cannot communicate with each other. After working nonstop for the past 216… |
2021-10-08 | |
| This is what the heat wave did at Mount Baker and what that means for Whatcom County | Bob Mitchell, a professor of hydrogeology at Western Washington University, said that if the planet’s warming trend continues, Mount Baker’s glaciers will keep retreating and the Nooksack could become fed by rainfall, rather than by glacial melt. “We’re predicting that the snowline will… |
2021-07-12 | |
| Earthquake initially centered in Farmington was ‘phantom’ but felt real to residents | Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a seismologist at Western Washington University, explained it this way in a series of Twitter posts: “Location algorithms can sometimes yield an incorrect location, though. This is because they are somewhat tuned to what they expect to record. For example, a… |
2021-07-09 | |
| A Burp or a Blast? Seismic Signals Reveal the Volcanic Eruption to Come | Last December, a gloopy ooze of lava began extruding out of the summit of La Soufrière, a volcano on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. The effusion was slow at first; no one was threatened. Then in late March and early April, the volcano began to emit seismic waves associated with swiftly… |
2021-06-29 | |
| Will a volcanic eruption be a burp or a blast? | Perhaps monitoring from space will become the best way to see future phreatic eruptions coming. But so far, no successful long-term forecast of a phreatic eruption has taken place. “Phreatic eruptions are terrifying,” said … |
2021-06-07 |