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This is the April edition of my paper round-up. Today I recommend papers on high-resolution topography data, fault mechanics, earthquake environmental/archaeological effects (liquefaction, rotated objects, landslides), Quaternary dating, a fault database for Asia, and tectonics of New Zealand and Martinique. Enjoy! more

It’s only one month since my last paper update and yet I have nineteen interesting new studies for you. Today’s round-up includes tsunamis, tectonic geomorphology, environmental earthquake effects and soft sediment deformation, new techniques/technology, and some classic paleoseismology. Enjoy! more

[Update 15 February 2017: Since Sascha is an author here now, the post was attributed to him.]
Greece is one of the main targets of RWTH Aachen’s Neotectonics & Geohazards group. They worked on paleo-tsunamis, active faults on the Peloponnese, in Attica, and on Crete, and on the application of terrestrial LiDAR and shallow geophysics for active tectonics research. In their latest paper, Sascha Schneiderwind et al. developed a methodology to aid paleoseismic trenching studies. They use t-LiDAR and georadar to better and more objectively characterise lithological units. His paper includes nice examples from Crete and from the famous Kaparelli Fault. Here is his guest blog: more

Tsunamis are a very real threat in the Indian Ocean. Most people will immediately think of the 2004 tsunami and the Sumatra subduction zone, but the Arabian Sea has seen strong tsunamis in the past, too. In 1945, a major earthquake at the Makran Subduction Zone caused a large tsunami (Hoffmann et al., 2013a). In 2013, the on-shore Balochistan earthquake caused a submarine slide which in turn triggered a tsunami that reached the coast of Oman (Heidarzadeh & Satake, 2014; Hoffmann et al., 2014a). There is also evidence for paleotsunamis along Oman’s coast (Hoffmann et al., 2013b; Hoffmann et al., 2014b). Now a team of scientists from RWTH Aachen University (Germany) and GUtech (Muscat, Oman) have published a tsunami inundation scenario for Muscat (Schneider et al., 2016). This is lead author Bastian Schneider’s guest blog on this research: more

I am quite happy that our new paper has finally been published in GJI. We worked on a fault between Aachen and Cologne in Germany and found that there has been a surface rupturing earthquake less than 9000 years ago, and possibly not much older than 2500 years BP. The area is of interest also because in 1755/56 a series of damaging earthquakes hit Düren and its surroundings – these are the strongest historical events in Germany that we know of. The quakes were felt as far away as Berlin, Strasbourg, and London, yet there were no primary ruptures. “Our” quake must have been much stronger… more

Great news reached us from Spain! Our colleague Julián Garcia Mayordomo spread the news that an updated version of the Quaternary Active Faults Database of Iberia (QAFI) is now available online. QAFI has a GoogleMaps-based interface with clickable features providing loads of content on fault geometry, fault mechanism, slip-rate, historical and pre-historical seismicity, geomorphology, compilers, further references and much more. Truly a wonderful tool, congratulations!

QAFI is hosted by IGME and can be found here: http://info.igme.es/qafi/ more

Here’s the February edition of my paper recommendations. This time we have:

• Paleoseismology in Germany and Nepal (the latter with a focus on charcoal dating techniques),
• Tsunamis in Greece, Portugal, Israel and Alaska,
• Turbidites in Portugal,
• New insights into the geodynamics of Mozambique,
• Fault rheology in Iran,
• Rupture jumps on strike‐slip faults, and
• A MATLAB tool for seismic hazard calculations.

Enjoy!

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Our colleagues Stéphane Baize and Oona Scotti from the French IRSN finished a report on the 2014 Napa Earthquake: Post-seismic survey report, with special focus on surface faulting. On 24 August 2014, an earthquake of magnitude Mw6 occurred on the West Napa Fault in shallow depth. The quake caused significant damage, an interesting pattern of surface ruptures, and the immediate attention of hundreds of geologists. The primary and secondary effects were mapped only hours after the event, which turned out to be extremely important – a large amount of afterslip was recorded in the following days. The earthquake was not only recorded by a huge seismometer network, but the ground motion was also captured by GPS sensors and InSAR images. The new IRSN report is especially concerned with the surface faulting hazard, since this agency is responsible for the safety of nuclear installations in France.  more

Plenty of paleoseismology papers have been published in late 2015 and early 2016 already! Especially those on the Gorkha earthquake made it to the news (Science and NatureGeoscience), but there is much more to discover. Check them out and – as always – tell us what we’ve missed. more

A few weeks ago, Nadine Reitman (USGS) published an interesting paper about the use of Photogrammetry for Paleoseismic Trenching in BSSA. In this guest blog she shares her key findings and explains how to minimise errors without spending too much time measuring control points. Thanks Nadine!

Structure-from-motion (SfM) is now routinely used to construct orthophotos and high-resolution, 3D topographic models of geologic field sites. Here, we turn SfM on its side and use it to construct photomosaics and 3D models of paleoseismic trench exposures. Our results include a workflow for the semi-automated creation of seamless, high resolution photomosaics designed for rapid implementation in a field setting and a new error analysis of SfM models. more