The L’Aquila earthquake from 6 April, 2009 caused more than 308 fatalities and destroyed about 15,000 buildings. A new initiative set up by the British architect Barnaby Gunning aims on creating a 3D model of the destroyed city in its present state with SketchUp for GoogleEarth. The model will be used for “creating a valuable resourcef for masterplanning the reconstruction”, Gunning states on the project’s homepage. For this purpose, dozens of volunteers took more than 60,000 photographs from the damaged infrastructure and were trained for using SketchUp. This is a great idea to document archeoseismological damage in the future – the models’ quality is increasing rapidly. However, some manpower is needed for a project like this. What do you think?
Related papers:
Papanikolaou, I. D., Foumelis, M., Parcharidis, I., Lekkas, E. L. , Fountoulis, I. G. (2009). Deformation pattern of the 6 and 7 April 2009, MW=6.3 and MW=5.6 earthquakes in L’Aquila (Central Italy) revealed by ground and space based observations. Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 10, 73-78.
Roberts, G. P., Raithatha, B., Sileo, G., Pizzi, A., Pucci, S., Walker, J. F., Wilkinson, M.,
McCarey, K., Phillips, R. J., Michetti, A. M., Guerrieri, L., Blumetti, A. M., Vittori, E.,
Cowie, P., Sammonds, P., Galli, P., Boncio, P., Bristow, C., Walters, R. (2010). Shallow subsurface structure of the 2009 April 6 Mw 6.3 L’Aquila earthquake surface rupture at Paganica, investigated with ground-penetrating radar. Geophysical Journal International, 183, 774-790.
There is a new textbook on Structural Geology by Haakon Fossen from University of Bergen, Norway. Check out Fossen’s website with the great pictures of folds and faults from the book free for academic use! He also provides impressive e-learning modules for education. Of course this does not substitute a good lecture, but will for sure help with the understanding.
Rod Holcombe provides free geological software on his website. You can download programs for stereographic projections, rose diagrams, wind roses, strain analysis plots and so on. There are a lot of other tools to explore, some of them for use with MapInfo.
Another great page for free geo software is the one of the Williams College OIT. Check out the seafloor-spreading simulator and the GeoShear software for simulating particle deformation in different stress settings.
Have you ever seen the seismogram of a home-run? Here is the report of an earth-shaking fan enthusiasm!
Wired came up with an impressive video of surfers riding a 5 mile wave in Alaska. They used the tidal bore phenomenon and had a great 45 minutes ride:
If you are using ground penetrating radar or if you would like to know more about this high-resolution geophysical method, don’t miss the abstract submission deadline for the IWAGPR2011 in Aachen: 28 January.
Have a nice weekend!
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