A violent earthquake roared and rumbled through the underworld of a distant corner of the planet covered by the restless ocean, far enough from any soul to be felt or heard.

“Below 40 degrees south there is no law, and below 50 degrees south there is no God."

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We (the team of 9 scientists and technicians from the Australian National University’s Research School of Earth Sciences) are out of strict 2-week quarantine and ready for a pre-voyage mobilisation. This includes a series of inductions and briefings prior to boarding, boarding, and final stages of preparation for the voyage.

Figure: Photographed on Kangaroo Island, this rock – called a ‘zebra schist’ – deformed from flat-lying marine sediments through being stressed by a continental collision over 500 million years ago. Dietmar Muller CC BY Dietmar Müller, University of Sydney ; Maria Seton, University of Sydney , and Sabin Zahirovic, University of Sydney Classical plate tectonic theory was developed in the 1960s.

A recent article in The Conversation by Simon Lamb from Victoria University of Wellington "uncovers the fundamental forces that control the Earth’s surface". They use Crust 1.0, ETOPO1, and the McKenzie and Priestley lithosphere model to compute their "Whole Layer Isostasy" model.

Though giant earthquakes are disastrous, they provide essential information to investigate earthquake physics. Thyagarajulu Gollapalli, a PhD student jointly from Monash University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, discusses our present understanding of such big earthquakes.

Recently, AuScope invested in a suite of Large-N or nodal seismometers, which are capable of recording seismic noise at local-, rather than regional-, scale, allowing seismologists to focus on imaging geological features like faults and aquifers.

I am locked in a small hotel in Hobart turned into a quarantine, tempted to write a story named “Tasmanian quarantine”, but, honestly, I can’t.   I could lament how unlucky, or brag how courageous we are to endure this isolation. I could show you how tiny the room is, in which I feel I could touch all corners at once if I stretched my hands and legs wide enough.

I decided to simplify the title of our new paper (Muir & Tkalčić), significantly, for the purposes of presenting it to a general audience.