The SSA2014 annual meeting took place in Anchorage, Alaska from 29 April – 2 May. Currently the post-meeting excursion on the effects of the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 is taking place, and we placed our paleoseismicity-spy Gösta Hoffmann in the group. We hope that no one realizes that he’s a desert geologist and absolutely in the wrong place, but he promised to not wear his Teva sandals in order not be identified. Gösta is Associate Professor at the German University of Technology in Oman (GUtech) and works on coastal change and tsunamis, and particularly on tsunamis in the Arabian Sea. Here is his report from Alaska: more
“Doggerland” refers to a drowned landscape located where the North Sea stretches today. Fishermen have found numerous archaeological artifacts when fishing between the coasts of UK and Denmark/Germany (more or less), which led to the idea that an ancient culture lived in this area when the sea level was lower some thousands of years ago. Archaeological studies and modelling confirmed this hypothesis (e.g., see Coles, 2000 or see this paper with a really cool title: White, 2006). Slowly rising sea levels and/or land subsidence forced our ancestors to move to higher grounds and to finally give up Doggerland at all around 8 ka ago. Jon Hill and his co-authors now added some more spice to this story. At the EGU they presented modelling data which imply that the Storegga tsunami over-ran the remaining islands, and that the end of Doggerland was sudden. more
I still try to catch up with all the amazing new stories on earthquakes, tsunamis and paleoseismology that made it to the media last week. Here is #2 on a reviewed tsunami database for Australia. more
A lot of interesting stories on earthquakes, tsunamis and paleoseismology made it to the media last week – no wonder as the EGU2014 and the SSA meeting took place at the same time. I will try to catch up and I start with tsunami hazard in Israel:
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The San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) was one of the most ambitious (and expensive) experiments in the history of active fault research. A borehole was drilled through the San Andreas Fault, 3.2 km deep and 1.8 km in horizontal direction. The borehole was equipped with a number of instruments in order to get data from right where the earthquakes occur, but most of the instruments failed already in 2008 due to the extreme conditions. While analyses of the drill core resulted in some great scientific achievements and enhanced our understanding of fault zones, almost no one seems to have much interest in the in-situ instruments. Or let’s say, no one can pay the necessary amount for re-equipping the hole, millions of dollars… more
Dear friends and colleagues,
We are all looking forward to the 5th PATA Days meeting! Don’t forget to register for this conference in Busan, Korea. The meeting will take place from 21-27 September and all information can be found at http://www.pata-days.org.
The second circular is out now, please download the pdf here (PDF, 800 kb). more
If you can’t find funding for attending the 5th Pata-Days in Busan, Korea, there is still the chance to see and present some good research on earthquake geology in Germany. There will be a session Active Tectonics and Earthquake Geology at the GeoFrankfurt 2014 meeting in late September, so don’t miss the deadline:
Dear colleagues,
Within the frame of the conference GeoFrankfurt 2014 we are organizing a session on Active Tectonics and Earthquake Geology (B13). The conference is held at the Goethe Universität at Frankfurt, 21-24 September 2014.
Conveners: Ioannis Koukouvelas, Kurt Decker and Klaus Reicherter
Deadline for abstract submission: 25 April, 2014 more
I added a couple of new papers to my literature collection last week. The studies deal with trenching in Iran and in China, tsunami research in Japan, Malta and Thailand, with archaeoseismology in Italy, and with seismic hazard of old oceanic lithosphere. Enjoy reading! more
At the end of last year, NHESS published a Special Issue on marine and lake paleoseismology. The volume 154 is an outcome of the ESF meeting Submarine Paleoseismology: The Offshore Search of Large Holocene Earthquakes that was held in
Austria in September, 2010. Guest editors are D. Pantosti, E. Gràcia, G. Lamarche, and H. Nelson. The Special Issue is open access and contains 16 research papers on all kinds of research on paleoseismology offshore. Some of the papers have been published as early as 2012, but others came out few weeks ago. more
The 2nd European Conference on Earthquake Engineering and Seismology (2ECEES) will take place from 24-29 August, 2014 in Istanbul, Turkey. The meeting is a a joint event of the European Association of Earthquake Engineering (EAEE) and the European Seismological Commission (ESC). There will be a session on Paleoseismology: more
