Mexico’s Popocatépetl volcano—a huge volcano that sits to the southeast of Mexico City—has seen a recent burst of activity. A couple weeks ago the volcano started seeping gas and ash, and yesterday the volcano blew its top in a violent explosion.

The explosion was captured on video, and in this sped up time lapse you can clearly see the shockwave of the explosion fly out from peak—shaking the clouds and racing down the volcano’s slopes. A build-up of pressure from gases seeping out of the volcano’s magma is behind these kinds of explosions. “This is akin to popping the top off a shaken bottle of soda — the dissolved bubbles come out of solution rapidly as the pressure is released and you get an explosion of soda,” says volcanologist Erik Klemmeti. On his his blog, Klemetti describes what we’re seeing:

[T]hese explosions come with a lot of force, and you can see after the initial explosion is how the clouds of water vapor around Popocatepetl shudder as the explosion front moves past. Then quickly, the upper flanks of the volcano turn grey from the rapid raining out of ash and volcanic debris (tephra).

For now, a live stream from the volcano shows that it seems to have died down. Mexico’s National Center for Prevention of Disasters still has Popocatépetl rated at Yellow, Phase 2, meaning that people should avoid the area – the same rating it has had for the past few years.

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The fire near Colorado Spring as of yesterday afternoon. Photo: Phillip Stewart

Wildfires are burning their way through Colorado, a region devastated by a series of potent fires last summer. Three fires, one near Colorado Springs, one in Rocky Mountain National Park, and one near the Royal Gorge Bridge, says the BBC, have so far forced the evacuation of thousands of people, including 905 prisoners.

The Colorado Springs fire, says ABC, has so far burned at least 8,000 acres of the landscape, torching up to 60 homes in the process.

“This fire is far from under under control or extinguished,” said Sheriff Terry Maketa to ABC of the Colorado Springs fire.

On top of homes and forests, says the BBC, the fires are also threatening the Royal Gorge Bridge, the tallest suspension bridge in the world. The bridge hangs 956 feet above the Arkansas river. So far, says the Gazette, the bridge seems to be fine, though the land on both sides have been torched.

The trio of Colorado wildfires are the latest in what is expected to be another bad fire season for the west. Indeed, says UPI, the ongoing Colorado Springs fire is supposed to pick up because of high winds and temperatures.

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Western U.S. Forest Fires Could Double Within 40 Years
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The radar signature of the May 31 El Reno tornado. Photo: NWS

In the past two weeks, Oklahoma has seen two massive tornadoes: the Moore tornado and the more recent El Reno tornado, both powerful EF-5 storms that were responsible for many deaths. Saturating the discussion around both storms was a bevy of dramatic close-up footage of the tornadoes as they tore through the landscape. Some of this footage was captured by news agencies and professional storm chasers, but much of it came from amateurs.

During the May 31 El Reno tornado, says National Geographic, when the National Weather Service was calling for people to take shelter, “at least 60 storm chasers stayed on the roads, heading directly toward the tornado itself. Radar imaging posted on Twitter Friday night shows that as the deadly El Reno twister touched down, several cars were precariously close to the tornado core.”

Four storm chasers died during that tornado, three of them experienced veterans, and three others had a close call when their car was tossed 600 feet.

The deaths have sparked a debate over the sensibility and usefulness of what many are describing as a notable increase in recent years of the number of people who are out there chasing storms.

The rise in popularity of storm chasing, said Tim Samaras, who died during the May 31 tornado, to National Geographic, has led to dangerous overcrowding near a big storm.

“We run into [storm chasers] all the time,” he said. “On a big tornado day in Oklahoma, you can have hundreds of storm chasers lined up down the road … We know ahead of time when we chase in Oklahoma, there’s going to be a traffic jam.”

That huge number of people on the roads, says Fox, is making an already dangerous situation even worse:

[T]here are too many people with a cell phone in-hand, simply calling themselves “storm chasers.” They clog roads and endanger legitimate researchers like the three who were killed Friday.

“We’ve known now for four or five years that the congestion has gotten so bad, you don’t have escape routes anymore,” Denzer told FOX 13. “You can’t get away.”

To put the risks of storm chasing in context, you need to think about two things: what a storm chasers’ purpose is and what it takes to achieve that goal. Storm chasers generally fall into two camps: those doing or contributing to scientific research, and those trying to capture video or images for media or news purposes. Well, maybe there’s a third camp: those there to gawk.

“You’ve got the group that are basically thrill seekers. They want to get their videos on YouTube. They want to be tweeted,” Dellegatto said.

Meteorologist and former storm chaser Dan Satterfield writes that the risks people are facing to capture all this footage of a storm are, from a scientific standpoint, unnecessary. Trained storm chasers are extremely useful for helping us understand tornadoes. They capture footage that can help researchers test or confirm their theories over how tornadoes work, and they provide on-the-ground confirmation for what weather forecasters are seeing in radar or satellite views. But to do that kind of work, you don’t need to put yourself in harm’s way.

The news media is overplaying the scientific benefit provided by nearly all of these chasers. Especially the silly ones taking armored vehicles on purpose into a tornado. That may make good TV on The Weather Channel, but it’s of no real scientific benefit. If you want to add to the science, take some calculus and enroll at [Oklahoma University.]

I’m sure Howie Bluestein can still fill a board full of equations to help you understand the real science! Dr. Bluestein measured the highest winds ever recorded on the planet in May 1999 during the first Moore Tornado. He did it from a mile away using a Doppler radar, not a ridiculous looking armored SUV.

There’s also the question of whether the news footage of a tornado is useful, but that’s a different discussion. Here Satterfield wants to point something else out:

I know of NO ONE who makes a real living storm chasing. No one. I do know quite a few meteorologists who make a decent living trying to figure out how these storms develop and how to forecast them better. They had to learn some physics and maths to do that.

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How to Understand the Scale of the Oklahoma Tornado

Last Friday, a powerful EF-5 tornado swept through the suburbs of Oklahoma City killing 18 people, including veteran tornado researchers and storm chasers Tim and Paul Samaras and Carl Young. Originally, the tornado was deemed an EF-3 on the Enhanced Fujita scale based on the damage it had done. But now, says the National Weather Service, the El Reno tornado has been upgraded to an EF-5.

Further, says Fox, the National Weather Service says that the tornado was 2.6 miles wide, making it the largest tornado ever observed. The previous largest tornado was 2.5 miles wide when it hit Hallam, Nebraska in 2004.

The El Reno tornado came just on the heels of the earlier EF-5 Moore tornado that killed 24 people in another Oklahoma City suburb. The El Reno tornado, says Fox, was twice as wide as the Moore tornado.

More from Smithsonian.com:

How to Understand the Scale of the Oklahoma Tornado
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Cleaning up damage from the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Photo: Geof Wilson

Straddling the boundary between the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates, New Zealand is a land of earthquakes. In just the past few years, a series of devastating ones have hit near Christchurch, the country’s second-largest city, leveling large parts and killing hundreds of people. But for the past five* months an earthquake of a different kind, centered near Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city, has been slowly rocking the country.

It’s a magnitude 7 earthquake, and it’s been going on all year.

It’s the strongest earthquake to hit the region in 150 years says The New Zealand Herald, “but none of the locals are diving under desks or sheltering in doorways.”

In a normal earthquake, the Earth lurches, releasing in some cases multiple atomic bombs-worth of energy in seconds. The shaking and rolling felt at the surface makes buildings tumble and gas lines rupture—an unpredictable disaster that seems to strike out of nowhere.

But the Wellington earthquake is different. What’s happening near Wellington is that that same amount of energy, and the same amount of movement of the Earth’s surface, is being spread out over months and months. It’s still a magnitude 7 earthquake, it’s just a gradual one.

Wellington’s residents aren’t in a panic, says GeoNet, because the Wellington quake is a strange type of earthquake known as a “slow slip earthquake,” a style of tremblor that scientists only really discovered over the past decade.

Unlike earthquakes, which seem to occur almost at random, slow slip earthquakes can be recurrent. They come and go, sometimes happening annually. In New Zealand, the Wellington quake is actually the third of a set: similar earthquakes were detected in 2003 and 2008, says GeoNet.

Since we’ve been studying them for only a short while, scientists don’t know much about slow slip earthquakes. We know they happen in the same fault lines as big earthquakes, though usually much deeper in the Earth. We know they can be recurrent. And we’re starting to figure out what might be behind them. What we don’t really know, unfortunately, is how they’re related to the faster, more dangerous breed of earthquakes. But by studying them scientists hope we might be able to get a better grasp on the forces behind the killer quakes, and maybe one day let us predict the next Christchurch.

*Story corrected to reflect how many months we’ve actually had in 2013 so far

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When hurricane Sandy made landfall on the east coast it wasn’t actually considered a hurricane anymore. Photo: NASA Earth Observatory

Mother Nature is unrelenting. Earlier in the week, Oklahoma saw one of the most costly tornadoes of all time. Then came word that not only is this year supposed to be another awful year for forest fires, but that forest fires are supposed to grow ever larger in the coming decades. Now, NOAA is forecasting an awful Atlantic hurricane season for the coming year.

For the East coast, hurricane season kicks off at the beginning of June and runs through November. Within this period, says the Associated Press, NOAA’s forecasters are expecting seven to 11 hurricanes, three to six of which will be big hurricanes. The total call is for 13 to 20 named storms, which includes hurricanes and the weaker tropical storms.

This expectation, of seven to 11 hurricanes, means this season could be more active than last year’s. In 2012, the Atlantic U.S. saw 10 hurricanes, with two of them being classed as major storms. A normal year, says the AP, has six hurricanes and three major storms. The AP:

This year, all the factors that go into hurricane forecasts are pointing to an active season, or an extremely active one, said lead forecaster Gerry Bell of the Climate Prediction Center.

Those factors include: warmer than average ocean waters that provide fuel for storms, a multi-decade pattern of increased hurricane activity, the lack of an El Nino warming of the central Pacific Ocean, and an active pattern of storm systems coming off west Africa.

The Atlantic hurricane season goes through cycles of high and low activity about every 25 to 40 years based on large scale climatic patterns in the atmosphere. A high activity period started around 1995, Sullivan said.

“What NOAA could not say was how many of these storms would make landfall,” says Climate Central. “That level of prediction is beyond the level of current science.”

The names for this year’s hurricane season have already been picked. Look for tropical cyclone Andrea in an Atlantic Ocean near you.

More from Smithsonian.com:

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Photo: State Farm

On Monday, we tried to put the tornado that ripped through central Oklahoma, killing 24 people, in historical context. The tornado stayed on the ground for 40 minutes, and the path of destruction was estimated to be 1.3 miles across at its widest. Winds blew at more than 200 miles per hour. We wrote how this monster storm fit in with what we know about tornadoes:

There are a lot of parameters by which a tornado can be deemed the worst, and by pretty much all counts today’s Moore tornado is up there. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration keeps a list of historical tornadoes—devastating twisters known for their size, their duration and their destruction. Though the Moore tornado doesn’t trump any of them, its combination of size, strength and duration made it an incredibly dangerous storm.

The aftermath of the storm has seen the clean-up and damage assessment begin. So far, the damage caused by the storm is estimated to have been in the range of $2 billion, a sum that would make this the 3rd most expensive U.S. tornado of all time.

At first, the storm was rated an EF-4 on the Enhanced Fujita scale. Since then, it has been upgraded to an EF-5, the highest ranking on the scale. The is the the 59th level 5 storm in the past 63 years. Though many people think of the Enhanced Fujita scale as a scale of wind speed, it is actually a scale for damage. By looking at the amount of damage caused to different types of structures, scientists assign the storm an Enhanced Fujita scale classification. From the amount of damage they see, they then try to reverse engineer the storm’s wind speeds.

As it tracks along the ground, a tornado’s power can change. By looking at the damage, you can see how the storm evolved. The National Weather Service put out this map showing how the Moore tornado grew from an EF-0 when it first touched down to an EF-4 in the heart of the city. It also briefly spiked up to EF-5 based on the damage seen at the Briarwood Elementary school.

Photo: National Weather Service

On Google’s Crisis Map, you can see the scar cut into the city by the tornado. Dotting the map are little triangles, each color-coded by the EF scale rating, with light blue being EF-0 and purple EF-5. Clicking on each of these triangles shows a description of the damage at the site and in many cases a photograph, a clear, if depressing, visualization of the Enhanced Fujita scale.

EF-1 to EF-4 rated damage in Moore, Oklahoma. Photo: Google Crisis Response

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How to Understand the Scale of the Oklahoma Tornado

A timelapse video from wmctv shows the progress of the destructive Oklahoma tornado. 

Update, 10:05 am, May 21, 2013: The Oklahoma City medical examiner said that at least 91 people had died as a result of the tornado but later revised that count, saying that only 24 deaths had been confirmed. Emergency workers were still working early this morning to make their way through debris at Plaza Towers Elementary School, where seven children have been found dead.

Originally posted on May 20: In Moore, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City, an incredibly powerful tornado just came and went, a nearly hour-long ordeal that, as of the time of this writing, has trapped 75 school children in their school, injured hundreds of people and left a city in ruins.

A meteorologist for the local news station KFOR called the tornado “the worst tornado in the history of the world.” That assessment is quite apt.

There are a lot of parameters by which a tornado can be deemed the worst, and by pretty much all counts today’s Moore tornado is up there. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration keeps a list of historical tornadoes—devastating twisters known for their size, their duration and their destruction. Though the Moore tornado doesn’t trump any of them, its combination of size, strength and duration made it an incredibly dangerous storm.

A map of tornado activity in the U.S., 1950 to 2011. Photo: John Nelson / IDV Solutions

One factor that really set today’s Moore tornado apart was its staggering size. According to The New York Times, today’s tornado was “perhaps a mile wide.” Other reports put it closer to two miles in width. According to NOAA, the largest tornado on record hit Hallam, Nebraska in 2004. That twister was two-and-a-half miles wide. “This is probably close to the maximum size for tornadoes; but it is possible that larger, unrecorded ones have occurred,” writes NOAA of the 2004 tornado.

On top of its massive girth, today’s tornado was also incredibly strong. The Associated Press reports that wind speeds in the twister hit upwards of 199 miles per hour (320 kilometers per hour). The record holder, says NOAA, saw winds peaking at 302 miles per hour (486 kilometers per hour.) That storm, unfortunately, hit pretty much the exact same place as this one. It swept just north of Moore on May 3, 1999.

The track of the May 1999 tornado and the preliminary path for today’s tornado. Photo: National Weather Service

But while the wind speed of today’s twister falls below that of the May 1999 storm, the damage caused by a tornado isn’t all due to wind speed. The amount of time that the storm stays on the ground is also incredibly important.

Today’s Moore tornado was on the ground for 40 minutes. Most tornadoes last just a few minutes. But they can sit around for up to an hour. One of the most deadly tornadoes in history, the 1925 Tri-State Tornado, sat on the ground for a terrifying three-and-a-half hours.

A screencapture from KFOR’s coverage shows the massive damage caused by the tornado. Photo: KFOR

Of course, while all of these parameters are a window into the destructive potential of nature, what matters most to many is the toll on human life. Though casualties are at this point still uncertain, FOX’s KDVR reports that “more than 171,000 people were in the path of the storm.” Several casualties have already been reported, but it will take time for the full destructive power of the storm to become known.

Fortunately, at least, casualties will likely be below the record set by the the March 1925 tornado that swept through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, the one that stayed down for 3.5 hours. That storm killed 695 people. Advances in early detection and warning systems have brought the deaths caused by tornadoes down over time, and one can only hope that people were able to seek shelter from the dark side of nature.

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Photo: wanderflechten

In 1700, a massive earthquake struck the west and northwest coast of the United Sates. Modern scientists first caught wind of the natural disaster through the scars it left on the land—massive, toppled red cedar trees and sand deposits washed far inland. Written records weren’t being kept in that region when the earthquake happened, but several years ago, scientists managed to pinpoint the date of that mysterious earthquake. In 2005, Smithsonian explained how they unraveled the mystery:

In Japan, officials had recorded an “orphan” tsunami—unconnected with any felt earthquake— with waves up to ten feet high along 600 miles of the Honshu coast at midnight, January 27, 1700. Several years ago, Japanese researchers, by estimating the tsunami’s speed, path and other properties, concluded that it was triggered by a magnitude 9 earthquake that warped the seafloor off the Washington coast at 9 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on January 26, 1700. To confirm it, U.S. researchers found a few old trees of known age that had survived the earthquake and compared their tree rings with the rings of the ghost forest cedars. The trees had indeed died just before the growing season of 1700.

The earthquake occurred along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a major fault line running from the Pacific Northwest to Vancouver. In recent decades, scientists have determined that this fault line may produce mega-earthquakes of 9.0 or higher on the Richter scale.

Considering all the geologic evidence, scientists now say a major earthquake strikes the Pacific Northwest every few hundred years—give or take a few hundred years. That means the next one could strike tomorrow.

This is why researchers hope to learn as much as they can, as quickly as they can about the devastating quake that rocked the land back in 1700. Earthquake prediction remains notoriously sketchy (just look at the recent example of researchers in Italy who failed to predict an earthquake in L’Aquila), so the more scientists can learn about what happened in the past, the better prepared they can be for the next disaster. And that next one could be coming soon, according to new research:

The Cascadia subduction zone is of particular interest to geologists and coastal managers because geological evidence points to recurring seismic activity along the fault line, with intervals between 300 and 500 years. With the last major event occurring in 1700, another earthquake could be on the horizon. A better understanding of how such an event might unfold has the potential to save lives.

The University of Pennsylvania team turned to a fossil-based technique for studying the Cascadia Subduction Zone. They took core samples throughout the region and then picked through the samples to find microscopic foraminifera fossils, a  type of single-celled aquatic protist. They used radiocarbon dating to estimate the age of these ancient creatures and to recreate past changes in land and sea level along the coastline. Through their analyses, they saw that the coastline ruptured in a heterogenous manner, or that the earthquake struck in different locations with different severity.

The earthquakes that occurred in this part of North America, they report, behaved similarly to recent major earthquakes in Japan and Chile, which arrived with very little warning. While the results are useful for modeling and understanding the next West Coast mega-earthquake, the researchers warn that some areas in Oregon will likely have just 20 minutes to evacuate before the tsunami waves arrive.

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The Waldo Canyon fire was the most destructive in Colorado’s history. Photo: NASA Earth Observatory

Last year was one of the worst wildfire seasons in Colorado’s recent history. A series of destructive blazes drove tends of thousands of people from their homes and caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage.

Last year’s awful fire season was spurred by a dry winter and higher-than-average temperatures. Those same conditions are back, says Climate Central, and the western U.S. is at risk once more.

Drought conditions have encompassed nearly the entire Western half of the country, with the worst of it centered in the Southwest and into California, which received only about 25 percent of its average precipitation during the year-to-date. “We’re confident we’re going to see above-normal significant fire potential,” Sullens said.

From California to Colorado, he says, the early-summer fire risk is high. Indeed, California has already seen a big blaze.

Forecasters are also concerned about a high risk of large wildfires along the Pacific Coast from California northward to Washington, and inland into Idaho and Southwest Montana, where very dry conditions exist in areas that have an abundance of vegetation, or fuel, to support potential fires.

… Vilsack said the combination of the drought, an abundance of dead or weakened trees from an epidemic of mountain bark beetles, and a likelihood of another unusually hot and dry summer is “a combination that doesn’t bode well.”

In many places the spring fire season has been off to a slow start, says Andrew Freedman, but according to the federal government this “has no bearing on where we think this fire season is going to go.”

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Dunwich beach, across which storms pulled the ancient city. Image: modagoo

In 1066, the town of Dunwich began its march into the sea. After storms swept the farmland out for twenty years, the houses and buildings went in 1328. By 1570, nearly a quarter of the town had been swallowed, and in 1919 the All Saints church disappeared over the cliff. Dunwich is often called Britain’s Atlantis, a medieval town accessible only to divers, sitting quietly at the bottom of the ocean off the British Coast.

Now, researchers have created a 3D visualization of Dunwich using acoustic imaging. David Sear, a professor at the University of Southampton, where the work was done, described the process:

Visibility under the water at Dunwich is very poor due to the muddy water. This has limited the exploration of the site. We have now dived on the site using high resolution DIDSON ™ acoustic imaging to examine the ruins on the seabed – a first use of this technology for non-wreck marine archaeology.

DIDSON technology is rather like shining a torch onto the seabed, only using sound instead of light. The data produced helps us to not only see the ruins, but also understand more about how they interact with the tidal currents and sea bed.

Using this technology gives them a good picture of what the town actually looks like. Ars Technica writes:

We can now see where the local churches stood, and crumbling walls pinpoint the ancient town’s remits. A one kilometer (0.6 mile) square stronghold stood in the center of the 1.8km2space (about 0.7 square miles), with what looks like the remains of Blackfriars Friary, three churches, and the Chapel of St Katherine standing within it. The northern region looks like the commercial hub with lots of smaller buildings largely made of wood. It’s thought that the stronghold, as well as its buildings and a possible town hall, may date back to Saxon times.

Professor Sears sees this project as not just one of historical and archaeological importance, but also as a forecast of the fate of seaside cities. “It is a sobering example of the relentless force of nature on our island coastline. It starkly demonstrates how rapidly the coast can change, even when protected by its inhabitants. Global climate change has made coastal erosion a topical issue in the 21st Century, but Dunwich demonstrates that it has happened before. The severe storms of the 13th and 14th Centuries coincided with a period of climate change, turning the warmer medieval climatic optimum into what we call the Little Ice Age.”

So, in a million years, when aliens come to look at our planet, it might look a lot like Dunwich.

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A funnel cloud in Texas. Photo: Charleen Mullenweg

For two years the majority of the continental U.S. has been plagued by drought, a confluence of natural cycles that have worked together to drive up temperatures and dry up the land. But for all the damage that has been done by the long-running drought, there’s been an upside as well. The lack of water in the atmosphere has also sent the U.S. toward a record low for tornadoes, says Climate Central‘s Andrew Freedman.

The National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) in Norman, Okla., estimates that, between May 2012 and April 2013, there were just 197 tornadoes ranked EF-1 or stronger on the Enhanced Fujita scale. That beats the previous 12-month low, which was 247 tornadoes from June 1991 and May 1992.

That’s the lowest recorded tornado activity since 1954, when scientists first really started keeping track. The number of deaths connected to tornadoes went down, too:

The U.S. did set a record for the longest streak of days without a tornado-related fatality — at 220 days — between June 24, 2012 and Jan. 26, 2013. And July 2012, which was the hottest month on record in the U.S., saw the fewest tornadoes on record for any July.

But the tornadoes didn’t just up and disappear, says Freedman in an August story. Rather, some of them just moved to Canada.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Don’t Blame the Awful U.S. Drought on Climate Change
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Tornado Power: Green Energy of the Future?

Image: NASA

Many parts of New York City are still reeling after Superstorm Sandy. Residents of the Rockaways are still without homes, and Breezy Point residents trying to rebuild their community are fighting with insurance companies and contractors. A recent report by Climate Central uncovered a few other unsavory side effects of the storm as well. Like the 11 billion gallons of sewage that ran from treatment plants into waterways during the storm.

This Bloomberg story puts that number into context. “That total is equal to New York’s Central Park stacked 41 feet high with sewage,” it says. The report found that of that sewage was partially treated, but about a third of it was totally untreated raw sewage. And 94 percent of the it spilled out due to the damage caused by coastal flooding. The problem hasn’t gone away either. Climate Central writes that “the last known Sandy-related sewage overflow took place in January 2013.”

Sewage treatment facilities are particular vulnerable to storm surges: they’re often built in low-lying regions and near water so that the sewage they treat can be released easily. Which means that future climate change and sea level rise will put these treatment plants at immediate risk. Climate Central’s press release:

“Sandy showed the extreme vulnerability of the region’s sewage treatment plants to rising seas and intense coastal storms,” said Alyson Kenward, lead author of the report. Most experts expect seas to rise between 2 to 4 feet by the end of the century even if aggressive actions are taken to control emissions of greenhouse gases.

Fixing the damage that Sandy caused will be expensive. State authorities say that in New York alone they’ll need to spend $2 billion. New Jersey has set aside $1 billion for repairs, and $1.7 billion for building a more resilient system to prevent future sewage outflows.

Climate Central built an interactive graphic to explain just where the sewage came from and went:

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Safe from Sandy? Help a Hurricane Researcher
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Repair crews inspect for damage after the 2011 Virginia earthquake. Photo: National Park Service

On August 23, 2011 a rare magnitude 5.8 earthquake hit Virginia. The shaking cracked the Washington Monument, toppled part of the National Cathedral and shook around a third of the U.S. population. Later that week, Hurricane Irene moved into the region, wiping out power, downing trees and, according to new research presented at the meeting of Seismological Society of America, says Nature, triggering more small earthquakes in the recently ruptured fault.

The rate of aftershocks usually decreases with time, says study leader Zhigang Peng, a seismologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. But instead of declining in a normal pattern, the rate of aftershocks following the 23 August, 2012 [sic], earthquake near Mineral, Virginia, increased sharply as Irene passed by.

The waves of the Virginia earthquake were felt far and wide.

Hurricanes are known to produce strong seismic waves all by themselves. Indeed, says Smithsonian‘s Surprising Science blog, Hurricane Sandy “generated seismic shaking as far away as Seattle.” But hurricane-triggered seismic waves these were not. These were real aftershocks. “Scientists did not initially notice the unusual pattern, Peng said, because the aftershocks were small (many below magnitude 2) and the hurricane itself produced a lot of seismic noise.” A careful analysis of the data, however, revealed that the aftershock activity actually rose around the time of the hurricane’s passing.

The scientists, says Nature, argue that “a decrease in pressure caused by the storm’s travel up the East Coast might have reduced forces on the fault enough to allow it to slip.” More research will be needed to definitively pin down the proposed tie between the hurricane and the earthquake. But the suggestion that the Virginia fault system would have been susceptible to the stresses caused by the hurricane aligns well with the idea that big natural systems, sometimes treated as if they act independently of the world around them, might actually all be connected.

The Irene-triggered aftershocks could have happened because the fault system that had ruptured in Virginia has memory—that is, the fact that it slipped so recently makes it easier for it to do so again. The idea of a natural system having memory is one that is becoming increasingly important for scientists trying to understand natural disasters. The idea is important to the field of complexity science. In a previous interview by this author with Surjalal Sharma, the University of Maryland astronomer explains this idea of memory:

“Memory is, essentially, a correlation in time or space. My memory of past events affects what I do now; that’s long range or long-term correlation. The bunching or clustering of events is, as we understand it, due to the memory of the events in a system. That is, a sequence of natural disasters may not be just a coincidence. [I]f we look at the data for floods, earthquakes, or solar storms, we see that their distributions are [not shaped like a bell curve.] This indicates that these are not random events. Rather, these systems have long-term memory.

So in the case of space weather, let’s imagine that a coronal mass ejection reached the Earth and disturbed the magnetosphere. There are two things about this disturbance that we need to characterize: one, how long does the visible or measurable effect of the disturbance last? The other is, how long would this system remember that the disturbance happened? If a second coronal mass ejection were then to come along within the memory time scale, the disturbance is likely to be much bigger and more prominent in some ways than the first, even if the two ejections are of similar intensity. It is in this context that we have to worry about long-term memory. As one might imagine, this is very important for extreme events.”

A fault that has slipped as an earthquake loads more stress. More research is needed, but if it turns out to be the case that hurricanes really can cause earthquakes, then Gaea just got a whole lot more dangerous.

More from Smithsonian.com:
Oklahoma’s Biggest-Ever Earthquake Was Likely Man-Made
Hurricane Sandy Generated Seismic Shaking As Far Away As Seattle

Image: macinate

The tragic events this week in Boston highlighted so many dichotomous things about our world: the power of people to come together, and to destroy one another. The power of social media to inform, and to disinform. The power of technology to connect loved ones and to keep us confused. After the bombings, cell phone service in the Boston area was a wreck as everyone tried to get a hold of loved ones. Phone calls dropped, texts arrived sporadically, and everyone waited breathlessly to hear from their family and friends.

In the past, long before cell phones, getting in touch with loved ones during a disaster was much harder. But the chances than you even knew about the disaster were low, too. The French invasion of Russia, which happened on the 24th of June in 1812, wasn’t confirmed by news sources until July 13th of that year. News that gold had been discovered in California took a full seven months to reach the East Coast. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln didn’t hit newspapers until twelve days after it happened. When bombs went off in Boston, however, news spread nearly immediately.

In historical disasters, too, there were less lifelines keeping those affected in touch with the outside world. In 1906, when a giant earthquake wracked San Fransisco and set much of the city on fire, there was little residents could do to contact one another. The New York Times story from the quake says:

Telegraph and telephone communication was cut off for a time.

The Western Union was put completely out of business and the Postal Company was the only one that managed to get a wire out of the city. About 10 o’clock even the Postal was forced to suspend.

In 1989, another earthquake hit San Fransisco. This time, the quake took down the main 911 call system, and the usual backup that would route 911 calls to other departments went down with a switch failure. On September 11th, when terrorists attacked the World Trade Centers, people reported calling 911 from the towers and being put on hold because the system simply couldn’t keep up. The combination of actual physical damage to infrastructure from the planes, and the volume of calls being made, rendered cell phones essentially useless.

During the 9/11 attacks, however, BlackBerry pagers allowed many to stay in touch while those without them could not. “I had my cellphone in one hand, and it was useless, and my BlackBerry in the other, and it was my lifeline that day,” Ms. Federman told the New York Times. The reason Blackberry pagers worked so much better at the time was that they didn’t rely on the same telephone system to send messages. Federman was able to email her husband terrifying messages, writing “IG WTC explosion. I’m going to street. I’m scared”, and, “Seems helicopter crashed into WTC, Going to street now. Very scary. End of world.”

In the aftermath of the Boston bombings, the internet made finding a loved one easier. During 9/11, by comparison, people posted photographs of missing family members downtown. The Japanese earthquake in 2011 was the first time the Google Person Finder got a lot of press, helping people from afar track their family members. The same tool was used to track marathoners this week. There are places like the Safe and Well List, maintained by the Red Cross, or the Contact Loved Ones project that came out of Hurricane Katrina.

In places without a robust infrastructure, it can be harder. When the earthquake hit Haiti, finding family members was much harder than it was for many in Japan. Some researchers tried to use cell phone signals to map and track people, but the earthquake destroyed reception. Japan is experimenting with blimps that could up telephone signals during emergencies.

In Boston, social media became the go-to for confirming the safety of their friends and family. Runners checked in on Facebook and Twitter to reassure family and friends that they were okay.

Technology is, in this way, a blessing and a curse. It lets us experience the pangs of a horrible event as it unfolds, but opens a way for us to connect with our families and friends to make sure they’re okay.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Nearly Every American Has Had to Deal With Some Weather Disaster Since 2007
Cruise Ship Disaster Arouses Concerns, Memory