Slow earthquakes along oceanic fracture zones: evidence for asthenospheric flow away from hotspots?

The regime of strain release along transform faults of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge system is studied. It is shown that earthquakes along certain fracture zones exhibit systematic discrepancies between values of their magnitudes measured at short and long periods, implying a regime of slower strain release, also observed in a pattern of complex body waveshapes. These “slow” fracture zones do not correlate with simple geographic or kinematic properties, but usually occur in the neighborhood of hotspot volcanism, frequently also characterized by gravity and bathymetry anomalies. We propose that regimes of slow strain release may be due to a partial lubrication of the fault along these fracture zones, which may itself be due to asthenospheric flow from the nearby hotspots, along the pattern of pipelines described by Vogt and Johnson and by Morgan.     

The detrital zone in the shorty crater cores

The lower part of lunar cores 74002/1 contains pure fine-grained black soil grading upward to orange soil. The section, however, between 10 cm and the lunar surface contains a mixture of orange and dark soil with a clast-in-matrix texture and some agglutinates. Therefore, this upper section is interpreted as a detrital zone. Although Shorty Crater was formed approximately 30 m.y. ago, all indicators of soil age give a much shorter time for residence of the detrital zone. Both absolute agglutinate content and authigenic agglutinate content indicate a surface residence of less than 8 m.y. for the detrital portion of the core. Most calculated ages of the detrital zone cluster are around 3 m.y. Grain size distribution is characteristic of an immature soil and there is little evidence, indicated by lack of upward fining and decrease in coarsest grain sizes, ofin situ maturation of the section. Mixing with adjacent soils is very low, even though such soils lie only 0.5 M from the sampling site. Four of the five sub-strata in the upper 10 cm could have been produced by the impact event that produced the 20 M wide boulder field near the sampling site on the Shorty Crater rim. This event would distribute perched clasts over the sampling site. Thickness of the detrital part of the section is in keeping with its being ejecta from the boulder bed crater. The thickness of the agglutinate-rich zone, 1.5 cm, is reasonable for a less-than 4 m.y. residence time.     

A negative search for an ultra-slow component to the source of the Yunnan earthquakes of May 29, 1976

Following Nagamune's suggestion of a giant, but very slow, component to the source of the Yunnan earthquakes of May 29, 1976, a systematic study of the ultra-low frequency content of a number of tiltmeter, strainmeter, and IDA records of the events is conducted. First, Nagamune's hypothesis is quantified, and it is found that it would require a moment in the range 10²⁹–10³⁰ dyn-cm. Such a large moment would have important consequences for our understanding of stress release in the plates, but is incompatible with the extent of the aftershock zone, and with observations on other instruments: specifically, only one IDA record shows a time-domain oscillation which may be related to the proposed source. In the Fourier domain, however, a spectral analysis fails to identify any of the Earth's modes in any of the available records, including the one originally used by Nagamune. It must therefore be concluded that the apparent signal present in a few records is due to noise—probably of instrumental origin—rather than to an ultra-low-frequency component of the seismic source.     

Seafloor character and sedimentary processes in eastern Long Island Sound and western Block Island Sound

Multibeam bathymetric data and seismic-reflection profiles collected in eastern Long Island Sound and western Block Island Sound reveal previously unrecognized glacial features and modern bedforms. Glacial features include an ice-sculptured bedrock surface, a newly identified recessional moraine, exposed glaciolacustrine sediments, and remnants of stagnant-ice-contact deposits. Modern bedforms include fields of transverse sand waves, barchanoid waves, giant scour depressions, and pockmarks. Bedform asymmetry and scour around obstructions indicate that net sediment transport is westward across the northern part of the study area near Fishers Island, and eastward across the southern part near Great Gull Island.     

Seabird mortality in the north Irish Sea and firth of clyde early in 1974

Heavy mortality of guillemots in the Irish Sea was recorded in 1969 and was the subject of a detailed enquiry. Organochlorine contamination was thought to be a contributory factor, although this could not be conclusively established. These persistent pollutants remain in the environment and further mortalities might be expected if they were indeed responsible. In January, 1974 there was a further heavy loss of seabirds in the area and, this time, investigators were prepared and the incident was carefully monitored.