Read COMET scientist Alex Copley‘s  blog about the hazards posed by active fault-lines within the Earth’s crust for the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction here.

Photo credit: Jens Aber on Unsplash

Europe’s Sentinel-1A spacecraft and its extraordinary images of slip from the South Napa earthquake herald a new era of space-based surveillance of faults.

On 24 August 2014, the San Francisco Bay area shook in an Mw = 6.0 earthquake, the region’s largest in 25 years. The tremors injured roughly 200 people, killed 1 person, and damaged buildings near the quake’s epicenter in the southern reaches of California’s Napa Valley. It also set off a scientific scramble to measure the fault’s movement and marked the dawn of a new age of earthquake satellite monitoring thanks to a recently launched spacecraft: the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1A satellite.

COMET scientists explain why in an article published in EOS, the Earth and space science journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Read more here.