When a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the Kobe region of Japan in 1995, killing 6400 people, nearby springs filled with carbon dioxide immediately afterwards. This often happens after large quakes but no one knew why.
Now a team of geophysicists think they have solved the puzzle. High temperatures generated by friction along a fault line are known to melt rock during a quake, and the team's chemical analysis of melts from the Kobe region now shows that this process forced rock to release large amounts of CO2.
Vincent Famin of the University of Réunion in Saint Denis, France, and colleagues calculated that rock melted during the Kobe earthquake could have released as much as 3400 tonnes of CO2 in just a few seconds. That could be hugely significant for understanding what drives earthquakes, the team says, because the sudden discharge of the gas would lubricate the rock, increasing the violence of
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment