Posts in the category »  Earthquake «  ( 119 Posts )

In microtidal seas such as the Mediterranean (tidal range ≈0.4 m sea-level indicators are commonly used to infer coseismic history. A list containing these indicators is long, including wave-cut platforms, marine terraces, displaced beach rock, biological agents, sedimentological and stratigraphical indicators, and archaeological indicators. Obviously, the trustworthiness varies a lot from one to another. For deriving late Holocene coastal tectonic activity, one of the most commonly used sea-level marker activity are tidal notches. These form distinct morphological and ecological erosional features developed within the tidal range [Pirazzoli, 1986; Antonioli et al., 2015]. more

The “Great 1117 Veronese Earthquake” was one of the strongest events that hit Northern Italy in historical times. Many aspects of this earthquake are still debated, but archaeological sources, historical archives, and geological records can help to better understand what had happened near Verona 900 years ago. On 20 January, 2017, a conference on the 1117 Veronese Earthquake took place in Venice, bringing together archaeologists, historians and earth scientists. The presentations were given in Italian, but Paolo Forlin from the Armedea project provides an English summary of the meeting. Read his highly interesting article here. more

If you are interested in visiting the epicentral areas of the recent earthquakes in the Central Apennines, Italy, this is your chance: A four days field trip will be held from 19-22 July, 2017, led by researchers who have studied the earthquake effects in detail. The trip focusses on the fault system that ruptured during the 1997 Umbria Marche, 2009 L’Aquila, and 2016 Norcia events. The trip is organised by scientists from Italy, France, UK, and Greece, and supported by a number of universities, state agencies, and INQUA, with the Università di Camerino as the main coordinator.

More information will be published soon. more

Annals of Geophysics has just published a special issue on the devastating Amatrice Earthquake series in Central Italy: Vol 59, Fast Track 5 (2016): The Amatrice seismic sequence: preliminary data and results.

The special issue, edited by Marco Anzidei and Silvia Pondrelli, contains lots of field reports, first assessments, and plenty of primary data. Plus, it’s all OPEN ACCESS! more

The M7.8 Kaikoura Earthquake in New Zealand produced one of the most complex ruptures ever observed, involving many different faults. Earthquake environmental effects include up to 10 m offset at the Kekerengu Fault, secondary ruptures, a tsunami, coseismic uplift, landslides and rockfalls, liquefaction, and maybe even earthquake lights. Lots of blogs and websites provide coverage on this earthquake, e.g. Geonet, the Landslide Blog, and The Trembling Earth. Our colleagues from the Research Group on Earthquake Geology in Greece worked on the landslides that happened during the earthquake. George Papathanassiou sent me the link to their Preliminary Map of Co-Seismic Landslides for the M 7.8 Kaikoura, New Zealand Earthquake. more

While the attention is still on the seismic sequence in Italy, a number of new papers have been published on paleoseismology, tsunamis, and active tectonics. Enjoy reading!

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Our friend and colleague Alessandro Michetti pointed me to this impressive video. It shows the surface ruptures of the 30 October earthquake from a helicopter: more

Our colleague Paolo Galli is in the epicentral area of the M6.6 Italy earthquake and he sent us some amazing images. I’ll just reproduce them here without further comment, they speak for themselves. Captions by Paolo. Thanks a lot Paolo, and stay safe! more

On 26 October two shallow normal faulting earthquakes occurred in Central Italy, very close to the epicentre of the Amatrice Earthquake from earlier this year. The first quake reached a magnitude of M5.5 and was followed by a M6.1 just two hours later. The events caused serious damage (see here for a video and some images), but luckily only one person died as most people had left their houses after the first moderate shock. This could have turned out much worse. Apparently the quakes at least partly filled the gap between the 1997 Colfiorito events and the 2016 Amatrice Earthquake. more

The EMERGEO Working Group has conducted extensive field work after the 24 August 2016 Amatrice Earthquake in Italy and put together a report on the coseismic effects. The report is in English and can be downloaded from the INGV earthquake Blog here: PDF (6.1 mb)

The report includes data on environmental earthquake effects like surface ruptures, fractures, landslides, and rockfalls. More than 2400 data points have been collected.

Please cite the report as follows:

• EMERGEO Working Group (2016). The 24 August 2016 Amatrice Earthquake: Coseismic Effects. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.61568

The EMERGEO Working Group consists of Pucci S., De Martini P.M., Nappi R., Pantosti D., Civico R., Ricci T., Moro M., Cinti F., Brunori C.A., Di Naccio D., Sapia V., De Ritis R., Gori S., Falcucci E., Caciagli M., Pinzi S., Villani F., Gaudiosi G., Burrato P., Vannoli P., Kastelic V., Montone P., Carafa M., Patera A., Vallone R. (all INGV) and Saroli M., Lo Sardo L., Lancia M. (University of Cassino and southern Lazio).

Thanks to Francesca Cinti for pointing me to this!