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The first part of my report on the field work that I did in Kazakhstan this year focussed on the stuff we had done in the South. Here is part II which is all about the Dzhungarian Fault. You’ve never heard about this fault? That’s easily possible. There are only very few papers that deal with this fault. In the 1960s Soviet geologist V.S. Voytovich published results from extensive field work on this fault (Voytovich, 1965; 1969). 40-50 years later a few studies on geodesy and geodynamics covered the broader study area and Shen et al. (2003) did some work in the Chinese part of the fault, but it took until 2013 before Campbell et al. revisited the Kazakh side and came up with new field data. They focussed on the tectonic geomorphology of this structure and determined a slip rate. Given this little amount of research done one would assume that the fault is not very large and of minor importance, but the opposite is true. The fault is around 300 km long in its Kazakh section and probably twice as long in total! more

I’ve spent several weeks in Eastern Kazakhstan this summer for paleoseismological field work. During the first part of this trip we looked at some thrust and strike-slip faults in the Ili Basin and the Saty area. The second part was almost entirely devoted to study the Dzhungarian Fault. I’ll blog about this second part later. Eleanor, David, Austin and me were the UK representatives in our team. We were so lucky to have Kanatbek from Kyrgyzstan and Aydin from Kazakhstan with us. They did not only lead us to all the interesting places and helped us to understand the geology and the tectonics, but they also did a fanatastic job organizing the field trip and dealing with the local surprises, which as you know happen in basically every field trip.

Our first study site was located at the northern boundary of the Ili Basin, where we did some work last year already. more

Several new studies have been published recently on old earthquakes and their geological footprint – time to list them and to recommend reading. Additionally, today’s paper digest also lists several articles which are not about paleoseismology, but geoethics. These papers were published in a special volume of GSL. They cover subjects that many paleoseismologists will have dealt with in the past or are likely to deal with in the future  – seismic risk perception, science communication, public outreach, and communicating uncertainties. One paper is dedicated to the L’Aquila trial. I find it very telling that this issue is not open access. Obviously, strengthening “public trust in geosciences” has still a long way to go…

Here are the latest papers:

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The following very interesting mail reached us by Abdelkrim Aoudia from the ICTP in Trieste (Italy):

Three Postdoctoral positions in paleoseismology and seismology

are available at the Earth System Physics (ESP) section of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP).  The two first positions (A and B) are funded by the GENERALI Group– a major player in the global insurance industry, in the framework of a research project integrating earthquake fault studies and simulations of the ground-motion.

The third position (C) is funded in the framework of an international collaborative effort following the recent Nepal Gorkha 2015 earthquake. The research topic involves a study of the structure, dynamics and seismicity of Nepal Himalaya.

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Greece is a Disneyland for neotectonics and active faulting research. Some of the most important findings in earthquake science have been achieved in Greece, its historical catalogue is one of the longest on Earth, and paleoseismology, archaeoseismology & tsunami studies are abundant. These are many good reasons to consider registration for the 14th Int’l Conference of the Geological Society of Greece (Thessaloniki, May 25-27, 2016), especially since the programme is full of earthquake science stuff. The deadline for submitting papers is September 30.

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Summer time is publishing time! Lots of new papers are out, today we have

• archaeoseismology & rotated objects;
• paleoseismology in Korea, China, & Portugal;
• trench photomosaicking and PBRs;
• lots of tectonic geomorphology (i.e., Ximena’s paper on the Carboneras fault where I did my diploma thesis in 2004…);
• news from the Balochistan earthquake; and
• tsunamis.

Enjoy reading and tell us if something is missing!

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Here is my latest update on paleoseismology-related literature. Plenty of new hot stuff has been published, today we have: archaeoseismology & liquefaction in Corinth, incredibly good data from the Gorkha earthqukae (Nepal), an earthquake that deviated the Po River, paleotsunamis in Israel and Taiwan, notes about tsunami boulders, and tsunamis in Greece. Enjoy!

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Is it just me or is the frequency of papers being published increasing…? Anyway, here’s the literature update with studies on paleoseismology and active tectonics. Today we have: Faulting in the Canyonlands, seismites from the Jurassic, a fake earthquake in Cologne, dynamic triggering, news from the San Jacinto Fault, ground motion variation between repeating earthquakes, metrics to evaluate seismic hazard maps, submarine tectonic geomorphology, the 1897 Great Assam Earthquake, and a collection of papers on geophysical imaging and interpretation of outcrops. Enjoy!

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In 2013, a M_W7.7 earthquake struck Balochistan, caused a huge surface offset and triggered a small tsunami in the Arabian Sea. Immediately, the apparently strange fault behaviour caused the attention of scientists world wide and a number of papers were published. The discussion is highly interesting and still ongoing. This an interesting case for paleoseismologists, too, not only because of the cascading earthquake effects, but also because of the surface rupture distribution, from which we might learn some important lessons for our future work. Now my colleague Yu Zhou and his colleagues from Oxford University published a new paper on this event, arguing that it might be not as unusual as it seems. Their research is based on the analysis of Pleiades stereo satellite imagery, which has proven to be a very useful data source already. Yu send me a nice summary of his recent research: more

The 2015 GSA Annual Meeting will be held in early November in Baltimore and since the deadline is approaching (11 August) it is time to check paleoseismology sessions. One of the many interesting sessions will be chaired by our colleagues Mark Quigley and Tim Stahl: “T186 – Estimating the Timing and Characteristics of Continental Earthquakes from Geologic Data”. Tim told me that there will be “some great invited speakers lined up speaking on paleoliquefaction, lake varve deposits and San Andreas fault paleoseismology“. more