Press Information

24.05.2013 | Strong earthquake at exceptional depth

This morning at 05:45 CEST, the earth trembled beneath the Okhotsk Sea in the Pacific Northwest. The quake, with a magnitude of 8.2, took place at an exceptional depth of 605 kilometers. Because of the great depth of the earthquake a tsunami is not expected and there should also be no major damage due to shaking.

17.05.2013 | GPS solution provides three-minute tsunami alerts

GFZ researchers have shown that, by using global positioning systems (GPS) to measure ground deformation caused by a large underwater earthquake, they can provide accurate warning of the resulting tsunami in just a few minutes after the earthquake onset. For the devastating Japan 2011 event, the team reveals that the analysis of the GPS data and issue of a detailed tsunami alert would have taken no more than three minutes.

09.05.2013 | Climate History of the Arctic as a Key to the Future

Analyses of the longest continental sediment core ever collected in the Arctic have provided an almost continuous archive of information on arctic climate dynamics for the period from 3.6 to 2.2 million years ago. It was during this period that a transition took place from the warm Pliocene to the Quaternary, the so-called Ice Age, in which we live today and through which the polar region, which undergoes glacial /interglacial cycles with varying ice coverage, is characterized