Christoph Grützner

Dear colleagues,

please consider submitting abstracts to the following session to be held at the IAEG XII Congress in Torino, 15-19 September 2014:

• Off-fault coseismic surface effects and their impact in urban areas
• Surface fault-rupture hazard in urban areas

more

On 2 Februar, a magnitude 4.5 earthquake occurred in shallow depth (~2-7 km) directly at the border between Austria and Slovenia. USGS reports an oblique-slip focal mechanism and a magnitude of Mw4.0 only. According to the Austrian Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik the quake was felt widely and even in Vienna. Very light damage has been reported from the epicentral area. more

We’ve seen several magnitude 6 earthquakes last week. On 28 Januar, a shallow M6.1 strike-slip event occurred in eastern Kazakhstan. A little surprise only, we knew about thrust mechanisms in this area, but of course some strike-slip movements do not change the big picture. Would be interesting to check for surface ruptures. This is, by the way, the study area of our friend and colleague Angela Landgraf. Maybe we can convince her to write something about the paleoseismological background of that area? more

Something many people have been waiting for happened last week. Judge Marco Billi explained his verdict in the L’Aquila case. In a 950 page document he published the so-called “motivazione”, stating that “the deficient risk analysis was not limited to the omission of a single factor, but to the underestimation of many risk indicators and the correlations between those indicators.” This should have been understood by the scientists, but instead they delivered a “superficial, approximate and generic” analysis. more

Annals of Geophysics’ latest Special Issue 55-5 is focussed on Earthquake Geology: Active tectonics in the Mediterranean and Europe: site studies and application of new methodologies. This issue was edited by L. Cucci, P. M. De Martini, E. Masana, and K. Vanneste and contains seven papers. As always, all articles are open access. more

A nice meme is currently having success in the geoblogosphere. Originating in XKCD’s up-goer five explanation of a space rocket using only the 1000 most common English words, dozens of geobloggers already explained what they are doing in simple language. Anne over at Highly Allochthonous has collected the results, and she and Chris already set up a tumblr-page for collecting the texts. Try on your own using this text editor. So, here is my job description more

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are one of the most important tools in geosciences and can be helpful in almost every discipline. They are widely used not only in academia, but also in industry and administration. Obviously, it’s a good idea to know how to use these softwares. There are dozens, if not hundreds of different GIS versions available, but only few of them are freeware, like QGIS. Our colleague Riccardo Klinger from Digital Geography started a crowdsourcing initiative to get money for creating a free online video tutorial for everyone who wants to learn QGIS. If you like this idea, support him here at startnext.de. more

The RealClimate blog network published two long articles on the state of the art of sea level rise estimations. Part 1 was written by Stefan Rahmstorf on 9 Jan, part 2 was posted today. What will we need to prepare for until the end of the century?  more

The latest issue of the Seismological Review Letters (SRL) contains some interesting papers on strong earthquakes, seismicity, and tsunamis. Here’s a list of papers that could be especially interesting for the paleoseismicity community: more

I am not entirely sure why the following video was produced, what it is aiming for and if it should be used in geoscience education, but I like it. It very nicely illustrates what a green potato would experience if it was on a cruise ship, from there went down to the seafloor with a yellow submarine, was trapped by a submarine landslide and subducted into the Calabrian Arc and then by using a time machine spit out by Stromboli volcano or so. I always wanted to learn about this. more