Just before 9.30am on Sunday 11 November, a series of unusual seismic pulses rippled around the world almost undetected.
The waves rang for over 20 minutes, emanating about 15 miles off the shores of Mayotte - a tiny island in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and Africa.
From here, they reverberated across Africa, setting off geological sensors in Zambia, Kenya, and Ethiopia.
They crossed the Atlantic, and were picked up in Chile, New Zealand, Canada, and even Hawaii nearly 11,000 miles away, the National Geographic reports.
Despite their huge range, the waves were apparently not felt by anybody. However, one person monitoring the US Geological Survey's live stream of seismogram displays did notice the unusual waveform and posted it to Twitter, sparking the interest of other geologists and earthquake enthusiasts.
[...] The bizarre waveform is what scientists call "monochromatic". Earthquakes normally produce waves of so many different frequencies, the wave readings appear more jumbled.
But the mystery waveform from Mayotte was a crisp zigzag, which repeated after steady 17-second intervals.
"They're too nice. They're too perfect to be nature," joked the University of Glasgow's Helen Robinson, who is study[ing] for a PhD in applied volcanology.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday December 05 2018, @05:20PM (1 child)
I disagree. It's not like there's an infinite amount of water so that sinking a volume of solid lets the water level unmodified. in fact, the volume of water on the entire Earth is surprisingly small as a proportion of entire Earth [usgs.gov]
The terminology that would scientifically describe the phenomenon is "redistribution of water volume, resulting in a different area of dry land".
If you include the post glacial rebound into account, you need to speak of "redistribution of water/crust/Earth's mantle volumes". Not very common-sensical for anybody unprepared to visualize the thing globally.
Or forget the "sea level" completely and deal in terms of "available area of dry land before and after glacier meltdown" - not only it's objective, but that is actually the metric that matters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by IndigoFreak on Wednesday December 05 2018, @06:22PM
So yes, displacing water most likely will cause the water level to rise(but the earth is varied and there are many factors where it might ultimately stay the same like if the short period of extra height causes the crust to compress back to the original height). But then how can NY be sinking because that means its displacing water causing it to rise?? So it's rising but sinking faster? I get physics. Their language is all wrong when speaking of this.
We are mostly on the same page here.