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A gaping hole in a dying tectonic plate beneath the ocean along the West Coast of the United States may be wreaking havoc at Earth's surface, but not in a way most people might expect. The researchers in the new study aren't the first to suggest that the Michigan-size Juan de Fuca (pronounced "wahn de fyoo-kuh") plate has a tear. But thanks to a new, detailed dataset, they're the first to say so with certainty. The Juan de Fuca plate is long, stretching about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) along the Pacific Northwest coast, from Vancouver Island, Canada, to Cape Mendocino,...

A new model of the Earth, 20 years in the making, describes a dynamic three-dimensional puzzle of planetary proportions. Created by University of Wisconsin-Madison geophysicist Chuck DeMets and longtime collaborators Richard Gordon of Rice University and Donald Argus of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the model offers a precise description of the relative movements of 25 interlocking tectonic plates that account for 97 percent of the Earth's surface. "This model can be used to predict the movement of one plate relative to any other plate on the Earth's surface," explains DeMets. "Plate tectonics describes almost everything about how the Earth's surface...

Seabed Shifts Pose New Perils in Tsunami Region By ANDREW C. REVKIN Published: March 17, 2005 The violent thrust of the seabed near Sumatra, Indonesia, that touched off catastrophic tsunamis in December created significant new risks of earthquakes and tsunamis there, seismologists are reporting today. The researchers say that the place at greatest risk from a new earthquake is the devastated city of Banda Aceh and that the tsunami risk lies along Sumatra's heavily populated southern coasts. But they added that any fresh tremors or waves would be unlikely to have anywhere near the destructive power of the December earthquake,...