I am quite happy that our new paper has finally been published in GJI. We worked on a fault between Aachen and Cologne in Germany and found that there has been a surface rupturing earthquake less than 9000 years ago, and possibly not much older than 2500 years BP. The area is of interest also because in 1755/56 a series of damaging earthquakes hit Düren and its surroundings – these are the strongest historical events in Germany that we know of. The quakes were felt as far away as Berlin, Strasbourg, and London, yet there were no primary ruptures. “Our” quake must have been much stronger… more
Great news reached us from Spain! Our colleague Julián Garcia Mayordomo spread the news that an updated version of the Quaternary Active Faults Database of Iberia (QAFI) is now available online. QAFI has a GoogleMaps-based interface with clickable features providing loads of content on fault geometry, fault mechanism, slip-rate, historical and pre-historical seismicity, geomorphology, compilers, further references and much more. Truly a wonderful tool, congratulations!
QAFI is hosted by IGME and can be found here: http://info.igme.es/qafi/ more
Here’s the February edition of my paper recommendations. This time we have:
- Paleoseismology in Germany and Nepal (the latter with a focus on charcoal dating techniques),
- Tsunamis in Greece, Portugal, Israel and Alaska,
- Turbidites in Portugal,
- New insights into the geodynamics of Mozambique,
- Fault rheology in Iran,
- Rupture jumps on strike‐slip faults, and
- A MATLAB tool for seismic hazard calculations.
Enjoy!
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Our colleagues Stéphane Baize and Oona Scotti from the French IRSN finished a report on the 2014 Napa Earthquake: Post-seismic survey report, with special focus on surface faulting. On 24 August 2014, an earthquake of magnitude Mw6 occurred on the West Napa Fault in shallow depth. The quake caused significant damage, an interesting pattern of surface ruptures, and the immediate attention of hundreds of geologists. The primary and secondary effects were mapped only hours after the event, which turned out to be extremely important – a large amount of afterslip was recorded in the following days. The earthquake was not only recorded by a huge seismometer network, but the ground motion was also captured by GPS sensors and InSAR images. The new IRSN report is especially concerned with the surface faulting hazard, since this agency is responsible for the safety of nuclear installations in France. more
From 20-22 June, 2016, the IASPEI – Regional Assembly of the Latin-American and Caribbean Seismological Commission – LACSC will be held in San Jose, Costa Rica. There will be some very interesting sessions on active tectonics, paleoseismology, seismic hazard, and intraplate faults: more
Plenty of paleoseismology papers have been published in late 2015 and early 2016 already! Especially those on the Gorkha earthquake made it to the news (Science and NatureGeoscience), but there is much more to discover. Check them out and – as always – tell us what we’ve missed. more
Dear friends and colleagues,
The 7th International Workshop on Paleoseismology, Active Tectonics, and Archaeoseismology (PATA Days) will be held in the USA from 30 May – 03 June, 2016. The workshop is sponsored by the INQUA-TERPRO Commission and mainly organized by James McCalpin. The workshop includes several excursions and we welcome presentations on a broad list of topics related to seismic hazards and active tectonics: more
A few weeks ago, Nadine Reitman (USGS) published an interesting paper about the use of Photogrammetry for Paleoseismic Trenching in BSSA. In this guest blog she shares her key findings and explains how to minimise errors without spending too much time measuring control points. Thanks Nadine!
Structure-from-motion (SfM) is now routinely used to construct orthophotos and high-resolution, 3D topographic models of geologic field sites. Here, we turn SfM on its side and use it to construct photomosaics and 3D models of paleoseismic trench exposures. Our results include a workflow for the semi-automated creation of seamless, high resolution photomosaics designed for rapid implementation in a field setting and a new error analysis of SfM models. more
This is this year’s last issue of my paper round-up, and it includes some pretty interesting stuff. Our Greek colleagues published a report on the liquefaction caused by the 2014 Lefkada earthquakes, just in time with the recent earthquake that hit more or less the same area again (Papathanassiou et al., and see earlier posts here). Long et al. published a paper on iceberg-induced tsunamis, found in the sedimentary record – that’s a great story, isn’t it? Jacobson’s PhD on the Lake Heron Fault (NZ) is an interesting read, and Iván Sunyol’s paper on paleoseismological trenches in Mexico is especially interesting for those who attended the 2012 Morelia meeting. Zhou et al. come up with a great dataset of Pléiades imagery from the El Mayor-Cucapah Quake, Calais et al. have a close look on the northeastern Caribbean, and finally, Kufner et al.’s paper is about the collision between India and Asia deep below the Pamir and Hindu Kush.
Enjoy reading and Merry Christmas!
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I am running this blog for more than five years now and it is time to acknowledge the other geo-blogs out there that have inspired me. In order to stay updated I follow the Geobulletin, which monitors the geoblogosphere activity. There are numerous amazing blogs out there that are either fun to read or interesting or both, but here I will focus on the ones dealing with earthquakes/tectonics/geomorphology/tsunamis. Here is my personal, subjective, but honest, list of earthquake blogs that I like and read: more
