Something many people have been waiting for happened last week. Judge Marco Billi explained his verdict in the L’Aquila case. In a 950 page document he published the so-called “motivazione”, stating that “the deficient risk analysis was not limited to the omission of a single factor, but to the underestimation of many risk indicators and the correlations between those indicators.” This should have been understood by the scientists, but instead they delivered a “superficial, approximate and generic” analysis.
Enzo Boschi replied: “I don’t feel in any way guilty.”
New blog on paleoseismological, tsunami research in Chile
Emma W and Ed Garrett set up a new blog to write about their paleoseismological project in Chile: QuakeHunters. In kind of a mission statement they write: “We (Ed and Emma) are in Chile looking for sedimentary evidence for past earthquakes and tsunamis. This is the first field season of our new Chilean Palaeoseismology project. We’ll be tweeting in the field from @EarthquakeEd and @QuakeHunting and will try to keep this blog up to date with longer posts and photos.” Will be worth following, I guess.
Beautiful faults in Death Valley
Callan Bentley from the Mountain Beltway Blog came up with a very nice picture from normal faults in the Death Valley here. Somehow I feel the people shouldn’t stand like this…
A quake, a quake – the lyrics
Some days ago I linked to a cartoon by Warner Bros. about the 1994 Northridge EQ. Thanks to Austin Elliott we can follow the lyrics now.
Very spectacular hydrothermal activity in New Zealand
No comment, just watch this great video from White Island:
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Lost your SD card in Arches National Park?
Did you lose you camera SD card full of photos while hiking in Arches National Park, UT, on 31 December 2012? Lucky you, check this site.
Guest blog at EGU blogs about the Lorca EQ
Robin Wylie’s first guest blog over at the EGU blog network is called Can Humans Make the Earth Shake? and deals with the González et al., 2012 paper that was published in Nature about the Lorca earthquake. (They say it was caused by groundwater extraction. Not triggered, but caused.) Despite I would be much more careful with interpreting the results and despite I do especially disagree with the statements made in Avouac’s accompanying paper, Robin’s article is interesting.
Rabaul volcano erupts
In New Britain, Rabaul volcano erupted last week, well, his younger brother Tavurvur. Great video footage of the rising ash!
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New airborne ice-radar instrument
This is interesting! Read this article on an airborne ice-radar device that is attached to a LC130 aircraft of the U.S. Polar Support. During every normal flight they can automatically gather ice thickness data!
I had a similar idea with cars – equip every tenth car or so with GPR antennas and a GPS, then read the anonymized data via a wireless link at the petrol stations. A perfect way to monitor roads and tracks, especially for sewage or pipe leakages and karst phenomena. Also, we could set up a georadar atlas of the world and make it accessible via GoogleEarth. What a great dataset would that be and how many faults we could find!
The geology of Canyonlands National Park
The Canyonlands National Park Service has uploaded a new video on the geological history of this beautiful landscape. Nothing new for the post-grad geologist, but maybe a nice piece for teaching.
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Have a nice weekend!
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