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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The INQUA Early Career Researcher inter-congress meeting will take place from 2 – 6 December, 2013 at Wollongong University, Australia. The meeting will bring together young earth scientists with a research focus on the Quaternary, from grad students to PostDocs. Thematic workshops on scientific writing and Quaternary science will be held and you’ll have the chance to discuss with colleagues fromn all over the world. The application deadline for travel support is 15 September, abstract submission and registration should be made before 1 October. There will be a Special Issue in INQUA’s journal Quaternary International in support of this meeting. This is a unique chance for ECRs, so spread the word and submit articles! more
From 14-18 October 2013 a field training course will take place in Central Argentina. The course and a workshop are organized by the Sam-GeoQuat Group, the topic is: “From the Pampean Ranges to the North Pampa: Tectonic and climatic forcing on the Late Quaternary landscape evolution of Central Argentina”. Deadline for registration is 30 August, so hurry if you are interested. Download the 1st circular (pdf, <1 MB) here: 1-course-sam-geoquat2013 more