RTZ Copper Mine landslide triggered quakes

The April 10, 2013, landslide at Rio Tinto-Kennecott Utah Copper's Bingham Canyon mine contains enough debris to bury New York City's Central Park 66 feet deep, according to a new University of Utah study. 

The slide happened in the form of two rock avalanches 95 minutes apart. 

The first rock avalanche included grayer bedrock material seen around the margins of the lower half of the slide. 

The second rock avalanche is orange in color, both from bedrock and from waste rock from mining. 

The new study found the landslide triggered 16 small quakes. Such triggering has not been noted previously. 

The slide likely was the largest nonvolcanic landslide in North America's modern history. 

Credit: Kennecott Utah Copper.

Last year's gigantic landslide at a Utah copper mine probably was the biggest nonvolcanic slide in North America's modern history, and included two rock avalanches that happened 90 minutes apart and surprisingly triggered 16 small earthquakes, University of Utah scientists discovered.

The landslide – which moved at an average of almost 70 mph and reached estimated speeds of at least 100 mph – left a deposit so large it "would cover New York's Central Park with about 20 meters (66 feet) of debris," the researchers report in the January 2014 cover study in the Geological Society of America magazine GSA Today.

While earthquakes regularly trigger landslides, the gigantic landslide the night of April 10, 2013, is the first known to have triggered quakes.

The slide occurred in the form of two huge rock avalanches at 9:30 p.m. and 11:05 p.m. MDT at Rio Tinto-Kennecott Utah Copper's open-pit Bingham Canyon Mine, 20 miles southwest of downtown Salt Lake City. Each rock avalanche lasted about 90 seconds.

While the slides were not quakes, they were measured by seismic scales as having magnitudes up to 5.1 and 4.9, respectively. The subsequent real quakes were smaller.

Kennecott officials closely monitor movements in the 107-year-old mine – which produces 25 percent of the copper used in the United States – and they recognized signs of increasing instability in the months before the slide, closing and removing a visitor center on the south edge of the 2.8-mile-wide, 3,182-foot-deep open pit, which the company claims is the world's largest man made excavation.

Landslides – including those at open-pit mines but excluding quake-triggered slides – killed more than 32,000 people during 2004-2011, the researchers say.

Fortunate;y, no one was hurt or died in the Bingham Canyon slide. The slide damaged or destroyed 14 haul trucks and three shovels and closed the mine's main access ramp until November.

Kris Pankow

"This is really a geotechnical monitoring success story," says the new study's first author, Kris Pankow, associate director of the University of Utah Seismograph Stations and a research associate professor of geology and geophysics.

"No one was killed, and yet now we have this rich dataset to learn more about landslides."

There have been much bigger human-caused landslides on other continents, and much bigger prehistoric slides in North America, including one about five times larger than Bingham Canyon some 8,000 years ago at the mouth of Utah's Zion Canyon.

More Information: Massive landslide at Utah copper mine generates wealth of geophysical data - GSA Today

Icelandic Tectonic Plate activity may trigger Katla

As scientists and air travellers alike keep a close eye on Iceland's ongoing volcanic eruption, some reports suggest that another, much bigger, volcano could stir in the near future.

Katla is Eyjafjallajokull's more active neighbour, and scientists believe that there may be a link between the two volcanoes.

This link has not been physically proven, explains Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson a geophysicist from the University of Iceland.

A circumstantial, historical connection "is putting people's eyes on Katla," he says.

"We know of four Eyjafjallajokull eruptions in the past [dating back to AD 500] and in three out of these four cases, there has been a Katla eruption either at the same time or shortly after.

"By shortly, I mean timescales of months to a year. "We consider that the probability of Katla erupting in the near future has increased since Eyjafjallajokull went."

Kathryn Goodenough from the British Geological Survey points out that, as yet, there is no physical explanation for this apparent link.

It seems that when Eyjafjallajokull goes off, Katla tends to follow. "Scientists don't yet know what the connection is," she says. "But we know there are fissures running between the two volcanoes. And they're quite close to each other.

"They're also being subjected to the same tectonic forces. So the chances are that if magma can find a pathway to rise beneath one of them, it can find its way to rise beneath the other."

Researchers do know that the two volcanoes have separate magma chambers, but many suspect that these chambers are physically linked in some way, deep beneath the surface of the Earth.

"But this is only speculative," says Dr Goodenough. "We don't have geophysical evidence that makes that clear."

Giant Laser set to trigger Fusion Reaction

The world's largest laser is approaching the long-sought goal of igniting a fusion reaction that produces more energy than the laser delivers.

Lasers are intended to do this by super-heating a fusion fuel pellet until it implodes, heating and compressing its central core to the temperatures and pressures needed for nuclear fusion.

Past experiments have been plagued by irregular implosions that wasted most of the input energy. But now, researchers led by Brian MacGowan of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have managed to squeeze targets of material into spheres rather than pancakes or more lopsided shapes, paving the way for future attempts at fusion.

The work was performed at Livermore's 192-laser beam National Ignition Facility (NIF), which began operating in 2009.

The team used targets that did not contain the key ingredients for fusion – two isotopes of hydrogen known as deuterium and tritium. But the symmetrical implosion of the targets suggests that NIF should be able to ignite fusion with laser pulses of 1.2 to 1.3 megajoules – well below its full 1.8-megajoule capacity.

"From everything we can see, we're on the right path here," Jeff Wisoff, a top NIF manager told New Scientist.

Researchers spent last year slowly cranking up the output of the laser, ultimately reaching a total energy of more than 1 megajoules. Now they're pausing to mount new instruments on the 10-centimetre-thick aluminium target chamber and to install giant concrete doors to contain neutrons they expect to produce in future fusion experiments.

In a few months, they will begin testing a series of new targets designed to assess beam interactions and compression. If all goes well, they could try for fusion ignition by the end of the year.

ATMs and Cash machines hacked

"SKULDUGGERY," says Andrew Henwood, "is a very good word to describe what this extremely advanced, cleverly written malware gets up to. We've never seen anything like it."

What he has discovered is a devious piece of criminal coding that has been quietly at work in a clutch of cash machines at banks in Russia and Ukraine. It allows a gang member to walk up to an ATM, insert a "trigger" card, and use the machine's receipt printer to produce a list of all the debit card numbers used that day, including their start and expiry dates - and their PINs. Everything needed, in fact, to clone those cards and start emptying bank accounts. In some cases, the malicious software even allows the criminal to eject the machine's banknote storage cassette into the street.

The software is the latest move in a security arms race after banks and consumers got wise to the fitting of fake fascias onto ATMs. These fascias have been criminals' main way of using ATMs to get the details they need to clone cards. They contain a camera to spy on PINs being entered on the keypad, and a card reader to skim data from the card's magnetic stripe. It's big business: across Europe, losses due to such fraud grew by 11 per cent to €484 million in 2008, according to the European ATM Security Team (EAST), funded by the European Union and based in Edinburgh, UK (see graph).

Banks responded by investing in anti-skimming technology - which can detect a fake fascia overlay and disable the ATM. So crooks are developing new tricks, which are being uncovered by Henwood and his colleagues at SpiderLabs, a computer forensics research centre in London.