Quite a number of articles in this month’s paper list are concerned with what happens or happened offshore in strong earthquakes. But of course there is a also a lot of classical paleoseismology and some new approaches to dating fault slip directly from the fault gouges. Enjoy reading and drop me a note if I have missed something.

Our colleague Gregory De Pascale advertises a PhD position in Iceland:

Do you want to do your PhD in Earth Sciences and research on an exciting Plate boundary in the North Atlantic? Earthquakes are the outcome of plate tectonic motions and important geological hazards and Iceland is a world class laboratory to study these complex systems. Although abundant modern seismicity including historic damaging events and complex tectonic and volcanic interactions are observed, little is known about the active faults, generally normal and strike slip, in Iceland that are responsible for these earthquakes and have an important control on eruptive centers.

The HI (i.e. University of Iceland)-based PhD student that will live in Reykjavik and will focus on the active faults in Iceland in a funded 3-year PhD in Geology project under the supervision of Associate Professor Gregory De Pascale. Applicant must be functional in written and spoken English. Start date is second half of 2024. This will be part of the Faculty of Earth Science and the Institute of Earth Sciences based in Reykjavik.

Our colleague Jacek Szczygieł from the University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland) has received funding for the project “Enhancing Paleoseismological Records through Multi-Methods Cave Deformation Analysis Tested in Diverse Hellenides Tectonic Regimes.” As part of this project, there are two open positions: a 4-year PhD student and a 2-year postdoc. Currently, there is no official application process in the online system, but this will follow, soon. If anyone has any questions, feel free to contact Jacek directly: jacek.szczygiel@us.edu.pl

This month’s list has everything: classic paleoseismology, tsunami studies, archaeology and historical seismology, lake turbidites from the Alps, deformed soft sediments, folds and faults, tidal notches and geodesy, etc.. Enjoy reading and drop me an email in case I have missed something.

Dear friends, our Twitter/X account @paleoseismicity has been hacked. I am not yet sure if I can manage to regain control. Please don’t trust any activity over there for now, don’t reply to messages, and don’t click any links. I am very sorry for this.

Update: For now I have set up the new account @paleoseismology.

Christoph

We have a long list of papers this month. Many paleoseismology studies including conceptual work, historical seismology, and interesting geomorphology and tsunami papers. Enjoy reading and let me know if I’ve missed something. 

The first Environmental Hazards in Asia Conference will take place in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, from 12-15 August with a field trip from 16-20 August. This conference aims to bring together practitioners of both with a focus on the hazards across Asia. The workshop will be structured to allow exploration of the underlying physical mechanics of hazards, explore the impacts of historical events across the continent and focus on the possible approaches to minimizing future impacts. The aim is to facilitate new ideas and proposals. Funds to support travel and subsistence to up to 20 participants from across Asia are available.

May 15th – Abstract submission deadline
June 1st – Fieldtrip registration deadline
July 12th – Online registration deadline

Meeting website: https://environmentalhazardsasia.wordpress.com/

Here’s the latest list of papers. Geographically, it’s really diverse this time, from Greenland to San Andreas, S Africa, the Caucasus and back. Also in time dimension – perhaps we have the oldest paleoseismicity in our list today? Enjoy reading and let us know if we’ve missed something.

This is a guest blog by Octavi Gómez-Novell, Universitat de Barcelona, visiting researcher at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). Contact: octgomez@ub.edu

Paleoseismic data are punctual and highly localized in defined fault strands, while earthquake surface ruptures cover much larger and complex regions in comparison. This makes the identification of paleoearthquakes in trenches strongly dependent on the slip that those particular events had at each trench site, as well as on the continuity and quality of the stratigraphy for those paleoearthquakes to be dated and well-constrained in time. For this reason, paleoseismologists always seek to increase observations by trenching several sites along fault deformation zones with the premise that more observational data might: 1) complete the paleoearthquake catalogues closer to the real event count that actually occurred, 2) reduce the event age and detection uncertainties and 3) give insight about surface rupture characteristics. While all of these premises are correct and proven successful in several cases, the truth is that in a handful of other cases increasing observations can significantly difficult the correlation of datasets between sites, making such interpretations highly subjective. For instance, in very populated paleoseismic datasets and/or those with large event date uncertainties there will be multiple correlation options; which is the right one? After all, even though based on observations, paleoseismic data are interpretations, hence models that should be treated as such. Thus, can we improve correlation using numerical modelling?

Here is the latest list of papers that deal with paleoseismology, past large earthquakes, active faults, archaeoseismology, and earthquake proxies such as tsunamis. Enjoy reading and let us know if we’ve missed something.