The Deform2015 school on Active Deformation, Faults and Earthquakes from Measurements to Models will be held in Southern France from 7-13 February, 2015.
Over the past years, considerable advances have been made in observing crustal deformation at scales of seconds to thousands of years.
However, a unified view of the earthquake cycle is still missing. The thematic school aims at bringing together students and scientists
working on different aspects of active faulting and earthquake processes. This school will provide a state-of-the-art view of the technics used to study active deformation as well as a perspective on the current models integrating the growing corpus of available data.
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Several new papers deal with paleoseismology and active tectonics studies. Wiatr et al. used terrestrial LiDAR to analyse limestone bedrock scarps, Hornblow et al. investigated the Darfield earthquake source in NZ. Sarikaya et al. present new data on offset alluvial fans in Central Turkey; Xu et al. present geological data on two historical seismic events in Tibet. Tectonic morphology is used by Barcelona et al. in NW Argentina. Mathew et al. use remote sensing data to analyze coseismic deformation in China. Ed Garrett and colleagues present data on 1000 years of megathrust quakes in Chile, and Bemis et al. have an interesting article on UAVs and paleoseismology. more
Our colleague Tim Dawson from the California Geological Survey (CGS) pointed me to this website, where reports and data on the Napa Earthquake of 24 August, 2014, are collected. There is a new document available for download, the EERI report at the top of the page, which adds some previously unpublished information, especially on the observed afterslip. Tim writes that “afterslip along the central 6-7 km of the rupture is about 35 cm (whereas it was initially only about 20 cm the day of the earthquake).” The afterslip seems to be still ongoing and is monitored with InSAR. more
The 6th INQUA workshop on Active Tectonics, Paleoseismology and Archaeoseismology will be held from 19-24 April, 2015, in Pescina, Fucino Basin, Italy.
We will remember the centenary of the 1915 M7 Fucino earthquake, that was one of the largest and most devastating earthquakes ever occurred in Central Italy.
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Springer has recently published the book Dynamic Tectonics and Karst in the series Cave and Karst Systems of the World, edited by our colleagues S. Shanov and K. Kostov. The book focusses on the influence of tectonic processes on the formation of karst and karst caves and one chapter is devoted to karst cave paleoseismology. The authors present studies from the Balkans, Cuba, and France. more
The 2011 Christchurch earthquake series had severe consequences and surprised scientists for many reasons. Ground motions were extremely strong despite the relative moderate magnitudes of the quakes (MW 5.3-7.1). The events happened on a system of hitherto unknown faults, some of which are located directly below Christchurch. Earthquake environmental effects (EEE), especially liquefaction, were intense and widespread. It turned out that subsequent quakes reactivated the same feeder dikes of sand blows, showing that saturated sediments are susceptible of liquefaction no matter if they had been liquefied recently (also see the paper of Quigley et al. (2013) on the liquefaction effects). Another stunning lesson was the occurrence of intense rockfall in the vicinity of Christchurch. In a recently published study, Mackey and Quigley (2014) dated rockfall boulders with 3He and show that they allow to estimate the recurrence intervall of local seismic events like the 2011 series. This works is a very interesting way to use EEE for paleo-earthquake studies. more
A couple of new papers on paleoseismology and related fields have recently been published. They deal with active tectonics in China, coseismic uplift in Japan, seismites in Canada, turbidite and lake sediment paleoseismology, earthquake environmental effects in Greece, paleotsunami deposits in India, an earthquake and tsunami in 1531 in Lisbon, tsunamites in Malta, tectonic geomorphology, scaling relationships in the Med, and the 2013 Balochistan earthquake and subsequent tsunami. If you miss recent studies here, drop us a mail. more
The GeoFrankfurt conference took place a few days ago. Due to the large amount of work presented on Eastern Mediterranean Tectonics, a special issue on this topic will be published in the International Journal of Earth Sciences (former Geologische Rundschau). Paris Xypolias allowed me to circulate the call for papers: more
The 5th PATA Days have been a great experience. We had lots of interesting science and discussions, great field trips, wonderful social events and a quite thoroughly insight into Korean cuisine. It was for sure the best organized PATA Days meeting that took place so far – many thanks and congratulations to Prof. Young-Seog Kim, Dr. Jin-Hyuck Choi and the fantastic Korean organizing team.
If you want to download the abstract volume and the field trips guide, here are the free download links: more
The 5th PATA Days (5th International INQUA Meeting on Paleoseismology, Active Tectonics and Archeoseismology) have started with a great icebreaker party on Sunday. On Monday we went on a field trip to Korea’s east coast and had a look at uplifted Late Quaternary terraces and some relatively young thrust faults. Plus, we visited a nuclear waste deposit site. Today the first presentations will start at 10 a.m. and the first poster session will be held. Here are some impressions from the first days:
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