It is our greatest pleasure to announce that a new special issue on paleo- and archaeoseismology has been published. The special issue of Quaternary International mainly consists of contributions from a selection of those presented during the first International Workshop on Earthquake Archaeology and Palaeoseismology held at the ancient Roman City of Baelo Claudia (South Spain) in September 2009. There in Southern Spain, the first joint meeting of the INQUA Focus Area on Palaeoseismology and Active tectonics and the UNESCO-IUGS programme IGCP567 on Earthquake Archaeology took place. This volume is one of the first accounts of an integrated approach in the study of past earthquakes combining recent advances in palaeoseismology and earthquake archaeology.
There’s a lot of great reading stuff or the summer holidays or on the plane to Corinth… more
Matthew’s WoGE #305 showed one of the rare sandstone outcrops in Georgia, the Broxton Rocks. The best hint was in the image source: “USDA Farm Service Agency” led me to search the US, and from the vegetation and the shape of the fields (and the E-W river!) it didn’t take too long to find it. But he was right – finding out about the geology wasn’t that easy.
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Earthquake prediction again: The former president of India, Abdul Kalam, said earthquake prediction will be possible within 10 years. It would be great if he was right, but he isn’t. Why do people continue to say that? There are so many that “predict” earthquakes, and so many people relying on them. What a pity… more
Our new paper on lake Ohrid was published in the ZDGG: Reicherter, K., Hoffmann, N., Lindhorst, K., Krastel, S., Fernandez-Steeger, T.M., Grützner, C., Wiatr, T. 2011. Active basins and neotectonics: morphotectonics of the Lake Ohrid Basin (FYROM and Albania). Z. dt. Ges. Geowiss 162 (2), 217 -234. more
This week’s Friday links are almost entirely earthquake related.
On James’ Empty Blog you can find some scary but interesting videos from the Japan tsunami area.
The 3rd INQUA-IGCP567 international workshop on paleoseismology and archeoseismology will take place in Mexico in November 2012. It’s the 100th anniversary of the Acambay Earthquake.
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The public version of the EEE Catalogue, a global catalogue of environmental effects induced by modern, historical and paleoearthquakes, is available at http://www.eeecatalog.sinanet.apat.it/terremoti/index.php. This public version has been developed on Google Earth and aims at providing basic information at earthquake, locality and site level, including the rupture zones (when available) and the local description of environmental effects, integrated by some imagery (photographs, stratigraphic logs, etc.). more
Cyprus explosion caused an M3.0 earthquake: On 11 July, a catastrophe took place in southern Cyprus. 2,000 tons of amunition confiscated from an Iranian ship on its way to Syria exploded. 13 people were killed and the military base and a neighbouring power plant were destroyed. Seismographs have registered the shock as an earthquake with magnitude ML3.0.
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This week’s centerfault is a very prominent one that you will know for sure – the Dead Sea Fault. The sinistral strike-slip fault marks the boundary between the Arabian plate and the Sinai. The entire system is more than 600 km long and has accommodated ~107 km of slip since Miocene. Magnitude 7 is no problem for this structure and the recurrence intervalls are short. more
The most exciting news this week surely were the media reports that a tsunami destroyed ancient Olympia in Greece, hundreds of years ago. Andreas Vött from Mainz University published a press release at the end of June about his research. Unfortunately, I have only found media coverage in German. The results will be presented at the Corinth2011 conference (registration still open)! more
The preliminary report on the Lorca Mw5.1 earthquake from 11 May 2011 is now also available in English! The quake caused a lot of damages to building despite the relatively low magnitude. One building collapsed and nine people died. The report summarized the geological background, environmental earthquake effects and damaged infrastructure. more
