The latest issue of Annals of Geophysics is devoted to Earthquake geology: science, society and critical facilities. Vol 56 (6) is a Special Volume, and I am proud to say it’s our volume! Finally, 14 papers are included in this issue, most of them authored by early career researchers (ECRs). The papers are based on work presented at the 2nd INQUA meeting on Active Tectonics, Earthquake Geology, Archaeology and Engineering in Corinth, Greece, 2011. The issue was edited by Christoph Grützner, Salvatore Barba, Ioannis Papanikolaou and Raul Pérez-López and all papers are open access! more
On 26 January and 3 February, two strong and shallow earthquakes of magnitude 6+ occured at the island of Kefalonia/Cephalonia in Western Greece. The events caused intense damage to buildings and infrastructure. A team of EERI (Earthquake Engineering Research Institute) scientists went to the island to map these kind of damages. Earthquake Environmental Effects (EEE) like rockfalls, landslides, and lateral spreading were also caused by the events. George Papathanassiou and his colleagues mapped these features and sent me the following photos from Lixouri. more
My latest paper deals with the Holocene activity of the Ventas de Zafarraya Fault in Southern Spain. It was published some days ago in the most recent issue of Cuaternario y Geomorfología. The Ventas de Zafarraya Fault (VZF) west of the Granada basin (36.96° N, 4.14°W) has a beautiful morphologic expression and an exciting history. The fault bounds the Zafarraya polje to the south, with Quaternary sediments to the north (hanging wall) and limestones of the Internal Subbetics in the footwall (Fig. 1). more
Besides the two special issues on tsunamis and paleoearthquakes that I’ve already blogged about, some more interesting papers on paleoseismology have recently been published. They deal with paleoseismology of the North Anatolian Fault, with tectonic geomorphology of S Spain, and with the ESI scale applied on a quake in Kashmir. more
A special issue on “Geology and Archaeology of Earthquakes” has currently been published in Cuaternario y Geomorfología (Quaternary and Geomoprhology, ISSN: 0214-1744), which is the official journal of the Spanish Quaternary Union (AEQUA) and the Spanish Geomorphological Society (SEG): Vol 27, No 3-4 (2013) – Geología y Arqueología de Terremotos. The issue includes an introduction and ten research papers on earthquake geology and archaeoseismology of the Iberian Peninsula. Most papers are in English, few in Spanish. more
Annals of Geomorphology has now published a new volume on Paleotsunamis in its Supplementary Issues. Issue 57 (4) is all about Reconstructing and modeling palaeotsunami events by multi-proxy geoscientific analyses. The volume is an outcome of the 2011 Corinth conference and edited by Andreas Vött, Klaus Reicherter and Ioannis Papanikolaou. I especially like it not only because I’ve organized the conference, but also because I am familiar with some of the study sites. Finally, I am co-author of the last paper. more
An interesting paper has been published in Nature Geoscience by Murphy et al.: Limit of strain partitioning in the Himalaya marked by large earthquakes in western Nepal. It doesn’t happen too often that paleoseismological papers are published in this journal and it’s also not too often that authors publish such beautiful photos. The authors identified a more than 60 km long rupture in W Nepal with 10 m of surface offset (strike-slip with a normal component). 14C dating points to seismic activity between AD 1165 and 1400. That’s pretty surprising for many reasons: more
Witold pointed me to a new book on tsunamis that was published by Springer. It’s called Tsunami Events and Lessons Learned – Environmental and Societal Significance and it is edited by Y.A. Kontar, V. Santiago-Fandiño and T. Takahashi. The book contains 25 papers on the following topics: more
The new open access journal Frontiers in Earth Sciences recently appeared. Its first published article in the Structural Geology and Tectonics section is an overview piece by Chief Editor Agust Gudmundsson about Great challenges in structural geology and tectonics. The article provides a nice round-up of some basic questions in tectonics that are still not well enough understood and which definitely need to be addressed in the (near) future. It starts from questions which sound easy to be answered (How many tectonic plates are there?), but actually aren’t. more
Elsevier has put together a number of papers that were published in its various journals on the Wenchuan 2008 earthquake and made a “Virtual Special Issue” out of that. So, the good news is not about new papers on that quake (some work was already published in 2011), but rather that this selection of papers is free until 14 February 2014 via this link: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/tectonophysics/virtual-special-issues/virtual-special-issue-on-the-2008-wenchuan-earthquake/
That’s not open access as we like it, but at least a step in the right direction.
