Word: geophysicists
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...confirmed, their findings could mean that Sir Isaac Newton's famous inverse- square law of gravity* is in danger of losing the exalted position it has held for three centuries. "It's like saying Mom and apple pie's no good anymore," admits the leader of the gravity project, Geophysicist Mark Ander. "You just don't do that lightly...
...core, hidden under thousands of miles of rock, was a mystery. Now all that is changing. In the past two years, thanks to a technological revolution in methods of observation, scientists have begun to paint a theoretical portrait of the planet's interior in startling detail. Says Harvard University Geophysicist Adam Dziewonski: "For the first time we can actually see the inside of the machine...
Armed for the first time with an accurate picture of the mantle's distorting effects, geophysicists around the world began an intensive probe of the core itself. Using supercomputers, they combined millions of seismological observations collected at some 3,000 surface monitoring stations into a single, overall picture. The image is fuzzy, admits Robert Clayton, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, "but I think everybody now agrees there is some kind of topography down there...
...drama of the recent discoveries, scientists still have a very tenuous understanding of the structure and dynamics of the core. Nonetheless, other areas of geology have advanced enough to give scientists a reasonably consistent idea of how the overall picture fits together. Says Subir Banerjee, a geophysicist at the University of Minnesota: "In every discipline, our measuring capabilities have gone up so much that we are at last able to home in on the earth's core by a number of techniques." For scientists who have long struggled to penetrate the mysteries at the center of the earth, solving...
Meanwhile, on an island southwest of Anchorage, the 4,025-ft. Mount ( Augustine volcano erupted for the second time, after being dormant since 1976. University of Alaska Geophysicist David Stone explained that the Mount Augustine eruptions, which shot ash eight miles into the sky, are loosely related to the earthquakes in that both are caused by the same "gross global mechanism": the glacial movement of the Pacific tectonic plate, which is inching north below California and diving under southern Alaska...