The Journal of Iberian Geology has now published a Special Issue “Active Faults in Iberia“, with J.J. Martínez-Diaz, E. Masana, and M.A. Rodríguez-Pascua as guest editors: J Iber Geol, 38 (1), 201. This volume comprises a great collection of new data on active faults, paleoseismology, intraplate earthquakes, and seismic hazard. One article also introduces the Quaternary Active Faults Database of Iberia. And the best thing is – all articles are open access and available for download! more
Two new paper have recently been published on the Tohoku Tsunami that devastated the Japanese coast in March, 2011.
In Sedimentary Geology, Chagué-Goff et al. published their results from investigations of chemical markers left by the waves in March, 2011. The authors sampled the tsunamites two, five and seven months after the event and determined the concentrations of chemical markers such as C, Ca, Cl, K, N, S, and Sr. more
Three papers published recently caught my eyes. First, Andrej Gosar investigated the earthquake environmental effects (EEEs) of the 12 April 1998 Mw =5.6 Krn Mountains earthquake, Slovenia. The quake measured VII-VIII on the EMS-98 scale, and Andrej found that the intensities reached the same values on the ESI2007 scale. He reports that the intensity distributions for both scales are comparable, but show some differences due to the sparsely populated epicentral area. The research concentrated on rockfalls for EEE determination. It’s a nice example that also moderate events can be characterized using the ESI2007 scale.
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I hope you have reserved some time for reading – here comes plenty of great new material on one of the most interesting tectonic features on earth, the Dead Sea Transform. The Israel Journal of Earth Sciences has published a special issue: The Dead Sea Rift as a natural laboratory for neotectonics and paleoseismology, Volume 58, Number 3 – 4. The papers are an outcome of the 2009 INQUA joint Israel/Jordan fieldtrip with the same name. I was lucky enough to have participated in that field trip. It was for sure one of the best field trips I ever had. more
The Royal Society of London ‘for Improving Natural Knowledge’, the world’s oldest scientific publisher, made its journal archive permanently free to access online. The first edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society appeared in 1665. Now, the archive contains more than 60000 papers. Here are the links to the press news and to the searchable archive.
Among the many papers of potential interest, I found the following two: “Observations on the parallel roads of Glen Roy, and other parts of Lochaber in Scotland, with an attempt to prove that they are of marine origin“, by a rather young Charles Darwin (1839) and “On the small vertical movements of a stone laid on the surface of the ground” (1901), where 2 mm/y “subsidence” was found through a smart and accurate mechanical approach (at least till when the stone disappeared). I stop here to not ruin your curiosity, but you can read more.
Based on a new inversion of InSAR data, De Natale et al. predicted that the Avezzano and Sulmona tectonic domains, in Central Italy, may anticipate by 15-20 yr the next large earthquake, as a result of stress transfer. Avezzano and Sulmona were razed by a large earthquake in 1915 and 1706, respectively.
Giuseppe De Natale, Bruno Crippa, Claudia Troise and Folco Pingue. Abruzzo, Italy, Earthquakes of April 2009: Heterogeneous Fault-Slip Models and Stress Transfer from Accurate Inversion of ENVISAT-InSAR Data. Bull. Seism. Soc. Am., 101(5), 2340-2354, 2011. DOI: 10.1785/0120100220.
A new paper published in Natural Hazards today discusses post-depositional changes of tsunamites. At sites in Thailand covered by sediments of the 2004 Sumatra tsunami, Szczuciński (2011) has documented significant changes in the deposits over the last seven years. Not only were the tsunamites altered, eroded or re-deposited by animals and seasonal rain, but also vanished in certain cases.
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A new book with focus on paleoseismology has been published by GSA. Special Paper 479 – “Geological Criteria for Evaluating Seismicity Revisited: Forty Years of Paleoseismic Investigations and the Natural Record of Past Earthquakes” is edited by Franck A. Audemard M., Alessandro Maria Michetti and James P. McCalpin. Again, a lot of interesting reading stuff for your flight to Corinth…
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
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
