Enlarge (credit: Salazar et al. 2022) A recent study of geological deposits and archaeological remains has identified a massive earthquake and tsunami that wiped out communities along the coastline of Chile’s Atacama Desert around 3,800 years ago. Studying the ancient disaster—and people’s responses to it—could help with modern hazard planning along the seismically active coast. […]
Enlarge / The Raspberry Shake, a simple seismograph based on Raspberry Pi hardware. (credit: Mike Hotchkiss, Raspberry Shake) On the afternoon of January 12, 2010, a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck about 16 miles west of Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince. Among the most significant seismic disasters recorded, more than 100,000 people lost their lives. The damage—costing billions of […]
Enlarge (credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities) Twenty-four hundred years ago, Heraklion was ancient Egypt’s largest port on the Mediterranean Sea. Today, the ancient city lies submerged beneath Abu Qir Bay, a few kilometers off the coast of Alexandria. Archaeology recently discovered the wreck of a warship from the city’s final years buried in the […]