Sabine
patreon
Earthquakes, Marsquakes, & Wine vs Beer
🕑 Added 2023-10-25 18:20:27 +0000 UTCEarthquake Warnings from Unused Seafloor Cables
(a) Map of detected earthquakes (b) Data used to detect the quakes. Image: Jiuxun Yin et al., GeoScienceWorld (2023)
Researchers at Caltech have used 50 km of existing submarine optical fibre cable between the U.S. and Chile to detect earthquakes. This technique, called Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), exploits the shifts of tiny flaws in optical fibres as seismic sensors. Over the four days of measurement, they recorded three small on- and off-shore earthquakes with magnitudes near 3. The team found that the offshore DAS can deliver earthquake warnings about three seconds earlier than land-based systems. They believe that they can improve the system by five more seconds. Press release here, paper here.
Mars Has Tectonic Activity After All
Detection spectrogram of the May 2022 Marsquake, S122a. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ETH Zurich)
Earth has earthquakes, so have you ever wondered if Mars has Marsquakes? It does. But until now, scientists thought that Mars lost its tectonic activity long ago, and the remaining quakes are caused by asteroid impacts. Well, it turns out it might be more complex.
Last spring, NASA’s InSight lander detected the largest quake ever recorded on Mars. Scientists initially believed that the 4.7 magnitude quake was the result of an asteroid impact, but an international team headed up at the University of Oxford in the U.K. has now looked for a crater, found nil, and concluded that the Marsquake must have been tectonic in origin after all. They still don’t think Mars has tectonic plates, but rather that it was a stress release in the crust.
Press release here, paper here.
Climate Change Downgrades Beer but Improves Wine
Feeling down about climate change? If you’re a beer drinker, you now have one more thing to worry about. According to a recent Nature paper, climate change downgrades beer. But if you’re a wine-lover, rejoice. According to a recent paper in IScience, its taste is going to benefit.
For the wine-study, they used 50 years of wine critic scores and weather data from the Bordeaux region of France. The results suggest that wine grapes thrive in the warmer, shorter, and rainier growing seasons that climate change brings, and that the ongoing climate shifts will likely further improve the taste of wine from the area. On the other hand, fifty years of analysis of hops plants in Europe reveals that under warmer temperatures, the flavour of beer will take a dive.
In summary: Wine: 1, Beer: 0
More here. Papers here and here.
Comments
Colleen, I really cannot remember how it tasted, it was the fact that was served warm ignoring our Big Professor host's request to have it served chilled, just a couple of hours after I explained why he was wrong, that definitely did not make his day. But there was no fighting, the way this ended was not nearly as interesting as that.
How did it go down? The wine, not the potential fisticuffs.
I almost forgot about this: When I was visiting, back in the 80's, at Stuttgart TH (now "University") the group I was with was invited to visit Stockholm by a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology there, quite famous then, to participate in a discussion on an idea of his that, if he was right, meant that anybody else, ourselves included, was wrong. I was chosen to give a rebuttal, probably because I the one least likely to suffer retribution and, or was the most expendable, and started my contribution by saying "This is just for the [invite] money" and continued by refuting his idea, which he did not like at all. (Many years later he come visiting the US National Geodetic Survey, near where I live, with his wife and all three became friends.) Nevertheless, in that earlier occasion, he invited all of us to have lunch at a restaurant he liked, hard by the landing of one of the many bridges of this city of bridges. Once seated, the sommelier came to ask what we would like to drink, and he asked back if they had a special Israeli red wine. The answer was "yes", so he then asked how was it served, warm or cold? The answer was "Warm, of course, Sir" with a clearly contemptuous sneer. So he corrected the wine-waiter: "This is a very special kind of red, supposed to be drank chilled." The other rejected such outrageous idea and things got heated. I thought he was going to leave, with us behind and still hungry, but no, so we stayed, got the famous Israeli red wine brought in and drank it. Warm.
