Friday Headlines – August 28, 2026

About Friday Headlines – Science Among Us

Science impacts us every single day in ways we frequently don’t recognize. Friday Headlines provides 1 to 3 events, news items, or publications that occurred in the last week or so that are geoscience-related.

Magnitude 4.9 earthquake – 4 km NNE of Jalālābād, Afghanistan

There was an earthquake in Afghanistan on Tuesday. It wasn’t a particularly strong earthquake, but it was nevertheless interesting for two reasons:

1. Despite not being very strong (Magnitude 4.9; quakes of this magnitude aren’t always felt at all), there was a Mercalli Intensity rating of VI (stong). A rating of VI means that most people felt it and that there may be some slight damage. This illustrates the difference between the Magnitude (formerly called the Richter Scale) and the Mercalli Scale. Magnitude is calculated based in the size and shape of the vibration waves on siesmometers. The Mercalli scale measures the amount of damage to human construction – everything from dishes rattling to buildings collapsing.
2. Afghanistan is located in a very geologically interesting part of the world. It lies where the western corner of India is moving into the eurasian continent. The Himalayas are part of this continental collision, but where Afghanistan is, there’s a lot of stretching and twisting resulting in less mountain building and more strike-slip faulting (like the San Andreas Fault in California).

Thunderquakes enable seismic imaging of Earth’s shallow subsurface

This is cool! We all know that thunder can shake the ground. Scientists use vibrations to look at structures deep in the earth. Sometimes, they use shaker trucks or small explosions to create the vibrations. Scientists also use vibrations from earthquakes. Such vibrations have been especially important in developing our understanding of the interior of our planet.

Now, scientists at Penn State have developed a method to use the vibrations from thunder to map the subsurface. These vibrations won’t allow us to map the interior of the Earth, but will give us a chance to look at structures that are shallow, and can be helpful for natural hazard assessments and groundwater resource management.

Read the original paper on Science Advances:

Imaging Earth’s subsurface with thunderstorm-generated seismic waves

Soil methane sink may be larger than thought, three-model analysis finds

This one is complex, but interesting, nevertheless.

As a company, EPOCH thinks a lot about soils. Recently, we’ve been reading about soil as a potential carbon sink, in the form of organic carbon. The question is whether or not farming methods can improve carbon sequestration from the atmosphere to mitigate the effects of global warming.

This paper isn’t specifically about carbon sequestration or farms, but it’s relevant. Just like carbon dioxide, CO2, methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas. Whereas CO2 may be sequestered into soils through living plants, methane may be sequestered by methane-oxidizing bacteria (methanotrophs).

The paper discusses how including methanotrophs in the models for understanding global carbon cycles helps the models more closely match real carbon measurements. Or more simply, as we work to understand how carbon moves through our atmosphere, considering methanotrophs in soils makes our understanding more complete and accurate.

Now all I have to do is figure out how this can apply to muck farms in Wayne County, NY.