Christoph Grützner

The EGU2014 will take place from 27 April – 2 May, 2014 in Vienna, Austria. The call for abstracts is open and submission deadline is 16 January, 2014. So it’s time to start thinking about which sessions would be interesting – not only for presenting own work, but also for listening to great talks. Here’s a list of sessions that a paleoseismologist could find interesting: more

Paleoseismologists from northern Central Europe are meeting regularly for discussions, usually twice a year, and the next small workshop will take place in Utrecht on 9 January, 2014. The one-day meeting is dedicated to present latest results of ongoing research on active faults in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany (intraplate seismicity). Participants from the Geological Survey of North Rhine-Westphalia, the VU Amsterdam, TuDelft, ULG Liége, the Royal Observatory of Belgium, TNO-GDN Utrecht and RWTH Aachen University will discuss the possibilities of joint projects and collect ideas on how to proceed with ongoing studies.
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Witold pointed me to a new book on tsunamis that was published by Springer. It’s called Tsunami Events and Lessons Learned – Environmental and Societal Significance and it is edited by Y.A. Kontar, V. Santiago-Fandiño and T. Takahashi. The book contains 25 papers on the following topics:  more

The new open access journal Frontiers in Earth Sciences recently appeared. Its first published article in the Structural Geology and Tectonics section is an overview piece by Chief Editor Agust Gudmundsson about Great challenges in structural geology and tectonics. The article provides a nice round-up of some basic questions in tectonics that are still not well enough understood and which definitely need to be addressed in the (near) future. It starts from questions which sound easy to be answered (How many tectonic plates are there?), but actually aren’t. more

Elsevier has put together a number of papers that were published in its various journals on the Wenchuan 2008 earthquake and made a “Virtual Special Issue” out of that. So, the good news is not about new papers on that quake (some work was already published in 2011), but rather that this selection of papers is free until 14 February 2014 via this link: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/tectonophysics/virtual-special-issues/virtual-special-issue-on-the-2008-wenchuan-earthquake/

That’s not open access as we like it, but at least a step in the right direction.

Researchers have discovered the remains of a royal wine cellar at the Tel Kabri archaeological site in Northern Israel. They found ~40 crushed jars, which equals about 3,000 bottles, and they were able to analyse the chemistry of the organic traces from the jars. It’s clear that they contained red and white wine, which was spiced with “honey, mint, cinnamon bark, juniper berries and resins” as it was common 1,700 BC. The fact that all jars contained wine with the same chemical fingerprint led the researchers to conclude that the wine had a high quality and was, therefore, likely part of the Canaan palace’ reserve. This is already a pretty good story, but the New York Times also mentiones that “the cellar was destroyed 3,600 years ago in some violent event, perhaps an earthquake“. Yee-haw, archeoseismology! Here we go! But wait – what do we actually know about the earthquake? more

Typhoon Haiyan was among the strongest storms ever recorded and likely the strongest one to make landfall in historical times. This mega storm hit the Philippines with windspeeds of more than 300 km/h. It caused thousands of fatalities, widespread flooding and devastation especially in its direct path. NASA’s Terra satellite is equipped with the ASTER sensor. This sensor is perfect for producing false color images of land cover and vegetation. In this image series it becomes clear that typhoon Haiyan destroyed a significant part of the vegetation around Tacloban. more

Several interesting jobs are currently vacant for paleoseismologists and earthquake geology scientists, from PhD positions to professorships. more

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