On 5 July 2019 at 1.33am (Singapore time), a Mw 6.4 earthquake struck the town of Ridgecrest in California. Its seismic waves could be felt from Los Angeles to San Jose. Nearly a day and a half later, on 6 July at 11.19am (Singapore time), a more powerful Mw 7.1 quake struck the same region. Because the Mw 7.1 earthquake is the largest event so far in this sequence, it is considered to be the mainshock. The events leading up to it, which include the Mw 6.4 quake, are considered to be foreshocks.

Tidal wetlands in the contiguous US can store roughly 800 million tons of carbon in their soils. That is the latest estimate from a team of over 30 scientists, including Professor Benjamin Horton and Dr Tim Shaw from the Earth Observatory of Singapore and the Asian School of the Environment, published on 21 June 2018 in Nature Scientific Reports.

Our Earth is warming. In fact, the planet’s average temperature has risen by 0.6°C over the past century, and is projected to rise another 2 to 6°C over the next hundred years. Small changes in the average temperature of the planet can translate to large and potentially dangerous shifts in climate and weather.

Last December, a big contingent from the Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS) travelled to the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference, the largest gathering of earth and space scientists in the world. Around 24,000 people descended upon San Francisco to catch up with colleagues, present their research, and learn about the latest advancements in their fields.