Hawaii Is Sinking 40 Times Faster Than Scientists Thought It Was
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."
As islands like O'ahu very slowly drift from the magmatic hotspot that once formed it, the island's weight is slowly causing it sink into the ocean at around 0.6 millimeters per year.
However, a new study shows that in some areas of O'ahu, that subsidence rate can be as high as 25 millimeters per year, roughly 40 times faster than expected.
Researchers believe this is largely due to some areas, such as the more industrial Mapunapuna region, experiencing compaction as it was originally built on sediment and artificial fill.
The geologic story of Hawaii has historically been one of ascension. More than a million years ago, when the Pacific Island Plate moved atop a volcanic hotspot rising through the Earth's crust, sea-level volcanic islands formed what eventually became the U.S.'s 50th state. Now, a new study from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa reports that the island chain may be reversing course—literally.
Published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, the study analyzes subsidence (the gradual caving in or sinking of an area) on the island of O'ahu, home of Pearl Harbor and the state capital, Honolulu. They found that in some areas of the island, located 185 miles northwest of the Big Island (or Hawai'i) which rests on top of the island chain's hotspot, the subsidence rate was at around just 0.6 millimeters per year. However, they also recorded areas that were sinking a stunning 40 times that rate at roughly 25 millimeters per year. This rate, along with the localized nature of the subsidence, is what caused researchers to raise a few eyebrows.
'Our findings highlight that subsidence is a major, yet often overlooked, factor in assessments of future flood exposure,' UH Manoa's Kyle Murray, lead author of the study, said in a press statement. 'In rapidly subsiding areas, sea level rise impacts will be felt much sooner than previously estimated, which means that we must prepare for flooding on a shorter timeline.'
Part of the reason for this discrepancy is that industrial areas such as the Mapunapuna area is built on sediment and artificial fill, which, according to the researchers, leads to increased compaction compared to other areas of O'ahu. This subsidence rate far outpaces the long-term rate of sea level rise, which is around 1.54 millimeters, and could cause problems for the region's shoreline on a shorter timetable.
'In places like the Mapunapuna industrial region, subsidence could increase flood exposure area by over 50% by 2050, while compressing flood preparedness timelines by up to 50 years,' UH Manoa's Phil Thompson, a co-author of the study, said in a press statement.
Efforts to address climate concerns on O'ahu, such as the science-based, community-driven Climate Ready O'ahu, are preparing for increased sea level rise and increased soil erosion along with other climate change-induced events, such as wildfires and flash flooding. While the conservation of wetlands and dune ecosystems will help stabilize shorelines, the researchers note that taking into account this concerning rate of subsidence will be vital for understanding the true timeline required to implement these climate adaptation strategies.
'Our research provides critical data that can inform state and county decision-making, helping to improve flood exposure assessments, infrastructure resilience, and long-term urban planning,' UH Manoa's Chip Fletcher, a co-author and director of Climate Resilience Collaborative, said in a press statement. 'This work directly serves the people of Hawai'i by ensuring that local adaptation strategies are based on the best available science.'
You Might Also Like
The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape
The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere
Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Scientists Just Discovered a New Type of Magnetism
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: Researchers have found a way to merge the properties of ferromagnetic materials (whose atoms spin in the same direction) and antiferromagnetic materials (whose atoms spin in opposite directions and cancel out magnetism). By applying just a small voltage, they were able to switch the direction in which the atoms of nickel iodide, an antiferromagnetic material, were spinning. The ability to manipulate the spins of atoms could allow for the development of computer chips whose storage is based on spin rather than charge, allowing for much more space and longevity. Magnetism can be a strange and powerful force. In an almost supernatural way, magnets stick to surfaces with no adhesives, which is why games like Etch-a-Sketch and Operation have fascinated generations of kids. Most of what we see every day is ferromagnetism (think refrigerator magnets), the phenomenon describing how metals like iron and nickel are magnetized in a magnetic field and thus adhere to certain surfaces. There are also paramagnetic materials, like aluminum, which have a weak and almost unnoticeable attraction to magnets. There's even antiferromagnetism—a type of magnetism in which magnetic atoms or ions in a material cancel their magnetism out if they end up next to each other. And then there is a magnetism that is none of the above. By merging properties of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic materials, MIT physicists created a new kind magnetism that may someday revolutionize the memory chips that store data in laptops and smartphones. It's called 'p-wave magnetism,' and it makes use of the spin of atoms in a material rather than their charge to create magnetic properties. '[This discovery] opens new opportunities for developing ultrafast, energy-efficient and high-endurance antiferromagnetic spintronic devices,' the researchers said in a study recently published in Nature. The find is particularly huge for the field of spintronics. It might sound like a DJ spinning tracks on an alien planet—and, to be fair, it's almost as far out—but it's actually a scientific discipline centered around manipulating the spins of atoms in ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic materials. Atoms in ferromagnets are known to spin in the same direction, and as these atoms spin, so do their electrons. Those electrons, spinning furiously around their nuclei, generate magnetic fields that cause ferromagnets stick to some metals. On the other hand, neighboring atoms in antiferromagnets have opposite spins, which means the electrons generating their magnetic fields are spinning in opposite directions. Antiferromagnets do not show visible magnetization, because the spins of their electrons and atoms cancel each other out—but the MIT team found a way around that. They synthesized nickel iodide (NiI2) in a lab and observed the behavior of the electrons in its atoms. Like a ferromagnet, the electrons did have one spin orientation they preferred, and like an antiferromagnet, there were enough electrons spinning in the opposite direction to cancel out magnetism. But there was something more. It turned out that nickel atoms form spiral patterns that mirror each other, which made it possible to manipulate the spins of those atoms with a voltage. This caused some atoms to switch their spiral path from spinning left to right, and vice versa, turning the material into a p-wave magnet. And the electrons had their spins switched right along with the atoms as a whole in the same direction of that voltage. This is how spintronics could seriously level up computer chips. With data taking the form of an electron's spin rather than its charge, it leaves much more space for storage. Spintronics could mean chips able to store amounts of information orders of magnitude greater than anything currently available. 'The reported results represent the first observation of an electrically-switchable unconventional [opposite direction] magnet,' the researchers said. 'These findings open a new frontier to realize symmetry-protected voltage-based switching of non-relativistic spin polarization in a compensated magnet.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Mathematicians Are Getting Closer to Translating an ‘Alien Language'
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: First proposed in 2012, the Inter-universal Teichmüller Theory (IUT) is a devilishly difficult math theory that experts describe as an 'alien language.' Although only a few mathematicians around the world understand any small portion of IUT, a 28-year-old tech worker recently made significant gains toward decoding the theory. This could help make progress in understanding math enigmas like the ABC Conjecture and Fermat's Last Theorem. It's likely that you won't understand any of the mathematics in this article, but you'd be in good company—most mathematicians don't understand it, either. That's because we're talking about the famously difficult Inter-universal Teichmüller Theory (IUT), first proposed across 2,000 pages in 2012 by Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki and vigorously debated in the 13 years since: is it a revolutionary way of understanding mathematics or a complete waste of time? The best way to think about IUT is that it's a completely novel understanding of mathematics that makes a drastic departure from the theorems taught in universities around the world. According to mathematics expert Kato Fumimot, speaking to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the theory is almost an otherworldly creation. 'Imagine an alien coming to Earth who can only speak an extraterrestrial language,' Fumimot told the SCMP. 'If he were to give a speech in front of a large group of Earthlings, surely no one would understand what he is saying, and no matter how many times he repeats it, there would be no progress.' Whole branches of mathematics have been set up to try to interpret the secrets of IUT. According to some estimates, only two dozen or so mathematicians in the world can even begin to understand this mysterious language. However, it seems that a promising new mathematician may have recently been added to their number. Zhou Zhongpeng isn't a learned professor or noted mathematician, but a former doctoral student turned tech worker—one that happens to be obsessed with learning IUT. After decoding key elements of IUT and proposing novel refinements and explanations of the ABC conjecture, he sent his work—uploaded to the preprint server arXiv—to the theory's creator, Mochizuki, and Ivan Fesenko, one of the few mathematicians who has made some headway in understanding IUT. According to SCMP and Interesting Engineering, Fesenko immediately reached out to Zhou and told him to fly to his campus in Westlake University in China. Zhou promptly quit his tech job and began working with Fesenko. If mathematicians at large are ever able to truly learn IUT, they could be able to find more efficient solutions to some of the field's most devilish problems. Take, for example, Fermat's Last Theorem. Formulated in 1637 and named after French mathematician Pierre de Fermat, the theorem states that no three positive integers (a, b, and c) can satisfy the equation an + bn = cn where 'n' is greater than two. Although this seems simple, it took more than 350 years to prove it, and the solution ran 130 pages long. Zhou's work could solve such a theorem in fewer steps and also prove useful for other mathematical enigmas. For now, IUT remains a mostly an 'alien language.' And because so many of the theory's adherents live in Japan, New Scientist says that, effectively, the proof is only true in that country. Only time will tell whether that claim spreads to eventually envelop the world. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Apple Watch 圈圈真的準？美國有研究指 Apple Watch 部份運動數據追蹤表現準度不足
Yahoo購物節，6月2至13日正式舉行！集合全球精選著數的網上大型購物節：波鞋低至36折、手袋低至4折、自助餐半價、旅遊產品買一送一等，更有獨家優惠為您而設，把握限時兩星期優惠，1Click買盡全世界！ 早前消委會就發表智能手錶評測報告，強調智能手錶、手環的運動數據都是估算，只適宜作參考之用。其實智能手錶在追蹤不同數據時準度的確存在著誤差。最近美國就有研究指 Apple Watch 於運動時記錄燃燒了多少卡路里的數據，準度並不是想像中的高。 美國密西西比大學的研究人員做了一個關於 Apple Watch 的研究，分析了 56 數據得出一個整合分析，並以 Apple Watch 每一項的表現都與標準的醫療級工具進行了比較。結果顯示 Apple Watch 於測量心率及步數方面極大部份情況下是準確的。研究人員指，測心率與步數的平均絕對百分比誤差（即衡量準確度的標準指標）分別為 4.43% 與 8.17%，然而估算燃燒了卡路里數據表現就達 27.96%。對於一般大眾買到的穿戴式裝置而言，低於 10% 的誤差值表現已被視為「十分優秀」，但研究團隊測試 Apple Watch 在走路、跑步、混合強度訓練和踩單車等多種活動中計算用戶燃燒了多少卡路里的數據時，卻發現其估算值大幅超出可接受範圍。 不過研究人員同時指出，這個數據本身就相當難以估算，因為涉及許多變數如體重及運動方式等等。因此，不要把每個數字都當作 100% 準確，而是可當成其中一種鼓勵的工具，達至恆常運動、保持追蹤習慣並維持動力。團隊還指出，目前 Apple Watch 的準確度已提高了不少，顯示蘋果在硬體及演算法方面都在逐步改進，而指出弱點可幫助開發者獲得更真實的回應建議，協助他們進一步研究，以製出更好的感應器或演算法，提升智能手錶追蹤健康數據的表現。 更多內容： 9to5mac 消委會試智能手錶運動偵測，Garmin 最貴最高分，一款千元級高評分！Apple、Samsung、華為各有高低 智能手錶推薦 2025 | Apple、三星、Garmin 如何選？三鐵、跑山、單車各有不同，睇清楚點揀！ 緊貼最新科技資訊、網購優惠，追隨 Yahoo Tech 各大社交平台！ 🎉📱 Tech Facebook： 🎉📱 Tech Instagram： 🎉📱 Tech WhatsApp 社群： 🎉📱 Tech WhatsApp 頻道： 🎉📱 Tech Telegram 頻道：
