The new issue of Seismological Research Letters has been published now and it contains a lot of articles for those liking old earthquakes. Some topics might sound familiar to you when you attended the PATA days conference as the authors presented parts of their work.
I have selected a few papers that are especially interesting to the paleoseismology community. They are about the use of Google StreetView for assessing macroseismic damage (Hinzen, 2013), archeoseismology in the Levant (Alfonsi et al. 2013), Earthquake rotated objects caused by the Emilia Romana earthquake – a fascinating EAE! (Cucci and Tertoulliani, 2013), a strong historical earthquake in Italy that likely did not happen at all (Camassi and Castelli, 2013) and new data on historical earthquakes in the Himalayan (Rajendran et al, 2013). Also, I added a paper on archaeoseismological investigations in northern Sicily that was published recently in Quaternary International (Bottari et al, 2013). Spend the rainy autumn evenings with a good read!
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On 15 October, 2013 a shallow Mw7.1 earthquake occured in Bohol, Philippines. The quake caused more than 200 fatalities and severe damages. Instrumental intensities of VIII – IX were recorded and the USGS estimates the maximum slip to be around 120 cm. Stéphane Baize from the French IRSN created a report not only on the seismological and tectonic background of the earthquake, but also on the earthquake environmental effects (EEEs) that were caused by the event. more
Dear colleagues and friends,
thank you very much for making the PATA Days 2013 such a great event! I hope you all had a safe trip back home or some more nice days with better weather. The abstract volume of the PATA Days is now available online. Currently, you can only download the entire volume, we will upload the single files into a sub-directory later.
Abstract volume Pata Days 2013: download more
A fascinating series of relatively shallow minor earthquakes is currently occuring in Romania in the Galaţi area. Around 40 events occured during the last few days, most of them with magnitudes of ~3. Now a mb5.4 earthquake happened in more than 100 km depth. The quake was felt in wide parts of Romania and Bulgaria. Due to its depth no damages are expected. First moment tensor solutions do not give a clear picture yet, but it seems like NE-SW trending thrust event could have happened at the SE bend of the Carpatian Mountains. more
After the strong earthquake in Pakistan a good part of the media coverage was about the fascinating story of the new island that emerged off Gwadar. While this was really amazing I think now it’s time to think about the consequences of the quake itself. We have seen a shallow M7.7 event that produced severe shaking across a large area. Peak ground acceleration exceeded 1 g in the 0.3 s period and was still intense in longer periods. 515 people have reportedly been killed and more than 100,000 are homeless. more
On 24 September a shallow M7.7 earthquake rattled Pakistan. At least 300 people died and thousands of houses, most of them adobe, collapsed in Balochistan Province. The quake was felt as far away as Muscat (Oman) and New Delhi (India). Epicentral intensities reached up to IX. The earthquake appeared to be a strike slip event. Soon the media reported on an amazing effect of the quake – in roughly 400 km distance a new island appeared few hundred meters off Gwadar. more
Dear friends and colleagues,
it’s only few days to go until the PATA Days conference will start with the icebreaker party at the Kuckucksnest in Aachen! We have more than 100 registered participants and we are looking forward an exciting meeting. If you attend the first two days 9-10 October, don’t forget to book a hotel in Aachen on your own, it’s time now.
You don’t have a hotel yet? Check out this pdf: Hotels and Travel.
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It’s time to revive the Friday Links tradition, I just realized that it fell asleep in March…
A paper published in Science few hours ago deals with the energy release of one of the strangest mega-quakes that we have ever observed, the M8.3 Okhotsk event of 24 May 2013. The interesting thing is that is occurred in more than 600 km depth! In the same issue of the journal another paper describes attempts to perform analogue experiments of such events in the lab. If you just want to get a rough idea about the studies or have no access to science, I recommend to check out Andrew Alden’s article at kqed science. more
A new paper by Esposito et al. has been published in Springer’s Landslide Science and Practice that will help to better constrain intensities on the ESI scale. Landslides induced by twelve moderate to strong earthquakes events during the last 300 yrs have been analyzed. The authors calculated distance vs. magnitude and distance vs. ESI epicentral intensity relationships, similar to the famous correlations by Keefer (1984). more
The latest issue of the Seismological Research Letters (SRL) has at least three papers dealing with topics interesting for paleoseismologists.
Hinzen et al. studied the rotation of objects (e.g., monuments) during the L’Aquila earthquake of 2009. They scanned the rotated objects with a high-res laser scanner, built discrete-element-models from the data and simulated the shaking necessary to cause the deformation. The results help to better estimate earthquake parameters from earthquake archaeological effects (EAEs).
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