• Hidden magma pathway revealed by 2025 Santorini crisis

    ByReet Kaur

    An intense earthquake swarm shook the Santorini–Amorgos region of Greece beginning on January 27, 2025, lasting about 45 days and producing more than 16 000 tremors between 5–15 km (3–9 miles) below the seafloor. A joint seismological study has revealed that the 2025 Santorini crisis was not a typical tectonic swarm. It was the signature of magma moving through a hidden corridor connecting the Santorini and Kolumbo volcanoes, two of the most active systems in the eastern Mediterranean.

  • Marine cores record Cascadia megathrust earthquakes followed by near-simultaneous San Andreas fault rupture

    ByReet Kaur

    A new study published recently in Geosphere finds that some of the largest earthquakes along the Cascadia subduction zone may have triggered nearly simultaneous ruptures on California’s San Andreas fault. The discovery suggests that the “really big one” in the Pacific Northwest could cascade southward, affecting much of the U.S. West Coast in a single sequence.

  • Ancient magma chamber fueled Japan’s 2024 Noto earthquake

    ByReet Kaur

    A solidified magma body formed about 15 million years ago beneath Japan’s Noto Peninsula may have intensified the M7.6 earthquake that struck the region at 16:10 JST (07:10 UTC) on January 1, 2024, according to a Science Advances study by Tohoku University. The ancient magma appears to have trapped stress below the crust until its failure triggered one of Japan’s strongest inland quakes in decades.

  • Hidden ring-fault system driving unrest beneath Italy’s Campi Flegrei

    ByReet Kaur

    A machine-learning model developed by Stanford University and Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology has uncovered more than 54 000 earthquakes and a sharply defined ring-fault system beneath Campi Flegrei, Italy, between January 2022 and March 2025, according to a study published recently in Science.

  • Coral skeletons reveal medieval tsunami and long-term seismic threat to the Caribbean

    ByReet Kaur

    A newly dated medieval tsunami between 1381 and 1391 CE struck Anegada, the northernmost of the British Virgin Islands, when an M8.0 or greater earthquake ruptured the Puerto Rico Trench, according to an open-access study published in Geophysical Research Letters on October 8, 2025.

  • Twin 15th-century eruptions plunged the planet into decades of cold

    ByReet Kaur

    A new analysis of Antarctic ice cores reveals that two volcanoes—Kuwae in Vanuatu and a yet-unidentified Southern Hemisphere volcano—erupted almost simultaneously around 1458–1459 CE, releasing sulfur and ash that triggered one of the coldest decades of the last millennium.

  • Taftan volcano reawakens after 710 000 years of sleep, revealing hidden hazards

    ByTeo Blašković

    A quiet, trigger-less swelling at Taftan volcano in southeastern Iran has exposed hidden instability within one of the country’s most remote volcanic systems. Using Sentinel-1 satellite InSAR enhanced by a new common-mode filtering method, scientists detected a ten-month summit uplift of about 9 cm (3.5 inches) between July 2023 and May 2024, marking the first confirmed volcanic unrest in the Makran subduction arc, where even long-silent volcanoes can awaken without warning and reveal unmonitored hazards.

  • Aseismic slip and seismic swarms preceding Taiwan’s 2024 M7.3 Hualien earthquake

    ByReet Kaur

    Years before the ground shook across eastern Taiwan, the faults beneath Hualien were already in motion. A new study in Nature Communications shows that deep aseismic slip and migrating fluids quietly increased stress by about 30 kilopascals before the April 3, 2024 M7.3 Hualien earthquake, revealing how silent deformation can set the stage for disaster.