Seismologist, Founder & Chief Scientist of @dljcss, Author of The Big Ones (Doubleday), Viol Player. I only accept media requests thru my website.
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May 18, 2018 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Lots of rumors going around about #Kilauea. Scared people make patterns to find safety, but we need to use science to tell us what patterns are real. This thread will have some basic facts about volcanoes. #ScienceForBetterDecisions.
1. Magna with more quartz is stickier, can grow into tall cone, traps gases & more likely to explode: Think Mt. St. Helens or Krakatoa. Low quartz magma, like Kilauea, create lava flows that travel out into a large, flatter shield volcano. Kilauea will not behave like St. Helens!
Apr 6, 2018 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It seems we need a Calif. geology lesson. The San Andreas is a plate boundary. Everything west of it is moving towards the northwest. Everything east is going southeast. Because the San Andreas is not straight, the plates get crunched.
The plates scrunched around the bend in the San Andreas break against each and get pushed up, creating the mountains north of LA and Santa Barbara. Think about how they come down in the rainstorms. Earthquakes are pushing them up faster than erosion is bringing them down.
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