Introduction: Voyager and Galileo showed that the surface of Europa has undergone significant reworking at some point during the moon’s history. The surface is covered in lineaments, which likely formed from the tides generated from Europa’s eccentric orbit around Jupiter [1]. There is also a relative paucity of visible impact craters, suggesting a surface age of about 80 million years [2]. The...

Arculus, R.J., 1987. The significance of source versus process in the tectonic controls of magma genesis. In: S.D. Weaver and R.W. Johnson (Editors), Tectonic Controls on Magma Chemistry. J. Volcanol. Geotherm. Res., 32: 1-12. Despite the association of certain characteristic trace-element signatures with particular tectonic environments of eruption, there are accumulating data which would resu...

In the last years, large effort has been done to carry out multi-channel seismic reflection surveys (MCS) in SW Iberia to locate the active tectonic structures that could be related to the generation of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the tsunami. The outcome of these researches led to the identification of a large, compressive tectonic structure, named Marquês de Pombal thrust that, alone can a...

Ecological studies often are subjected to unintentional biases, suggesting that improved research designs for hypothesis testing should be used. Double-blind ecological studies are rare but necessary to minimize sampling biases and omission errors, and improve the reliability of research. We used a double-blind design to evaluate associations between nests of red wood ants (Formica rufa, RWA) a...

Four earthquakes above M5.0 in Yunnan and Tibet, China occurred from 2010 to 2011. By calculating the tidal-force changes induced by celestial bodies in this region, we found that the earthquakes occurred when tidal forces continuously grew from low to peak levels and approached the maximum amplitude phase, which indicated a tidal force that had a trigger or inducing effect of active tectonic e...

Enceladus exhibits a strong tectonic contrast between its South Polar Terrain (SPT), which is young and geologically active, and its northern hemisphere, which is relatively ancient and stable. Previous global three-dimensional spherical models of convection exhibit patterns that are symmetrical around the equator and fail to explain the formation of a hemispheric dichotomy. Here we present glo...

In recent years, tectonic plate movements have caused huge natural disasters, such as the Great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake and the resulting Asian tsunami, which led to significant loss of human lives and properties (Ammon et al., 2005; Lay et al., 2005). Scientific evidences proved it was the beginning of a new earthquake supper-cycle in this active area (Sieh et al., 2008). In order for scien...