Texas on EARTH Magazine

Wind or water? Hurricane Harvey's most destructive force

Mon, 18 Mar 2019 18:55:20 -0400

Hurricane Harvey made landfall along the Gulf Coast of Texas on Aug. 25, 2017, one day after this image was taken. The storm continued to wallop the region for another five days. Credit: NASA/NOAA.

On Aug. 25, 2017, Hurricane Harvey, a massive Category 4 storm with maximum sustained wind speeds of 215 kilometers per hour, made landfall on the Texas Coast between the barrier island towns of Port Aransas and Port O’Connor. For the next five days, Harvey pummeled the coast and areas inland, producing torrential rainfall — more than a meter in some places, and about 70 cubic kilometers overall — which caused catastrophic flooding in the Greater Houston area. The flooding in and around Houston, 250 kilometers north of where Harvey made landfall, made news headlines for weeks. What was less widely reported, however, was the damage from storm surge and winds in Gulf Coast towns.

Tracking Hurricane Harvey's freshwater plume

Tue, 05 Jun 2018 16:43:07 -0400

Fire coral (Millepora alcicornis) covers a rocky pinnacle in Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary. The reefs, which grow atop salt domes in the Gulf of Mexico, were discovered by fishermen in the early 1900s, and designated a marine sanctuary in 1992. Credit: NOAA.

On Aug. 25, 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall along the Texas coast as an unexpected Category 4 storm, with maximum sustained winds of 209 kilometers per hour. After rapidly intensifying over the Gulf of Mexico, it hovered over southeastern Texas for days, slowly weakening as it dumped 68 trillion liters of water onto the land — more than three times the volume of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

Airport earthquakes continued after injection ended

Tue, 01 May 2018 16:08:04 -0400

Seismicity induced by wastewater injection around the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport did not cease when injection stopped. The solid red line delineates the Airport Fault, while the dashed red line marks a cross section in a new pore pressure study. Credit: K. Cantner, AGI modified from Ogwari et al., 2018.

Since Oct. 31, 2008, when seismic activity was first detected, hundreds of earthquakes smaller than magnitude 3.4 have peppered a fault zone that partly underlies the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) in north-central Texas. After the quakes were linked to the subsurface disposal of wastewater fluids from oil and gas operations in wells located within a kilometer of the initial quakes, wastewater injections into those wells were halted in August 2009. A new study finds that quakes near the airport continued for years after the wells were shut down, suggesting that halting wastewater injection may not immediately stop induced seismicity.

Geomedia: Film: 'Written on Water': A Modern Tale of a Dry West

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 11:12:57 -0400

Filmmaker Merri Lisa Trigilio. Credit: Merri Lisa Trigilio.

An endless patchwork of circular fields surrounds the small West Texas town of Olton. The unnatural shapes and sharp boundaries of the brown and green fields result from center-pivot irrigation systems that pull water from the Ogallala Aquifer and allow more crops to grow than the semi-arid landscape would otherwise allow. On these dusty farms and within town offices a drama is unfolding over what to do as irrigation wells run dry.

Everything's bigger in Texas, including the Wink sinkholes

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 16:20:57 -0400

Measurements from satellite radar images of two giant West Texas sinkholes (dark black areas) show the ground around them is sinking, indicating a new, much larger sinkhole could be developing. Credit: Jin-Woo Kim, SMU.

Residents of the neighboring West Texas towns of Wink (population 940) and Kermit (population 6,000) have had decades to get used to a pair of large sinkholes that opened a couple of kilometers apart between their towns, the first in 1980 and the second in 2002. But according to a new study, the ground around the two holes is subsiding and unstable, opening up the possibility that they could collapse into one giant sinkhole.

Benchmarks: September 8, 1900: Massive hurricane strikes Galveston, Texas

Fri, 19 Aug 2016 15:18:38 -0400

Wreckage in Galveston Bay near Texas City on the mainland. After the storm, debris clogged the Gulf Coast for miles. Credit: Library of Congress.

Everyone said it couldn’t happen. City leaders saw no need for an expensive seawall, trusting local meteorologist Isaac Cline when he claimed that it was “impossible for any cyclone to … materially injure the city.” And so, on the morning of Sept. 8, 1900, when the skies over Galveston, Texas, darkened with rain and the winds blew strong, residents of this booming barrier island community believed their city could weather any storm. By the next morning, the city lay in ruin, blasted by a Category-4 hurricane that killed an estimated 10,000 people — a quarter of the island’s population — and more than the combined death tolls of all other landfalling U.S. hurricanes since.

Getting there and getting around Texas' Trans-Pecos

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 10:30:46 -0400

West of the Pecos Museum. Credit: ©Kent Kanouse, CC BY-NC 2.0.

If you’re driving through West Texas on Interstate 10, which runs from Jacksonville, Fla., to Santa Monica, Calif., you’ll pass right through the Trans-Pecos region. Commercial air service is also available into El Paso International Airport, located about 170 kilometers west of Guadalupe Mountains National Park. A car is necessary to get around the area; you can rent one at the airport if you choose to fly in. Fall is a great time to visit the region, once the summer heat has waned.

Travels in Geology: Touring Texas' Trans-Pecos

Mon, 06 Jul 2015 13:46:38 -0400

The Trans-Pecos region, part of the Chihuahuan Desert, bears little resemblance to eastern Texas, which is flatter, wetter and more populated. Credit: ©Adbar, CC BY-SA 3.0.

When Robert T. Hill first arrived in Texas in 1874 at the age of 16, little was known about the geology of the arid, far-western corner of the state. While working at his brother’s newspaper in the frontier town of Comanche, Hill, who would come to be known as the Father of Texas Geology, became fascinated by fossils along the slopes of the region’s blocky buttes. After searching for information on the rocks he was looking at, Hill realized they’d never been formally described. With his enthusiasm growing, he returned to the eastern U.S. to pursue a geology degree at Cornell University. In the course of pursuing his thesis, Hill participated in an expedition to west-central Texas, during which he defined the “Trans-Pecos” area, the remote region of the state west of the Pecos River.

Highlights of 2010: Offshore wind in Texas and the curious case of Massachusetts