Fingerprinting Slow Earthquakes 23
CarnegieScience writes "The most powerful earthquakes happen at the junction of two converging tectonic plates, where one plate is sliding (or subducting) beneath the other. Now a team of researchers, led by Teh-Ru Alex Song of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, has found that an anomalous layer at the top of a subducting plate coincides with the locations of slow earthquakes and non-volcanic tremors. The presence of such a layer in similar settings elsewhere could point to other regions of slow quakes."
Thin end of the wedge (Score:3, Funny)
This is a bad idea.
Soon enough they will start fingerprinting the smart earthquakes. And before long they will be swabbing the mouths of the earthquakes looking for DNA.