While the majority of geoscience blogs is in English, I personally have the feeling that Spanish must be the second most popular language in the geoblogosphere. Videoblogs are not so numerous, but there are some really good ones out there. Nahúm Méndez Chazarra‘s Un geólogo en apuros (A geologist in trouble) is one of them. He writes ‘normal’ blog posts, but also produces nice videos. Nahum mainly blogs about earthquakes, geology in general, the geology of the Iberian Peninsula, and geoscience education. Make sure to check out his latest piece on Folklore geológico in which he informs about the cultural perception of earthquakes in Spain. more
As we are often use geodata and analyse, store them or visualize them using a GIS we depend somehow on the person on the other side to understand how a GIS functions or how to use the GIS. A webmap- like the well know google maps- is therefore an easy way to communicate your data and results. But creating a webmap is not always a funny thing to do as we are more geoscientists than programmers. QGIS2leaf for QGIS is a great plugin for creating a basic webmap. more
The Friends of the Pleistocene went on a fieldtrip few days ago to study the 4D Architecture of an Oblique Rift Margin in Baja California, NW Mexico. The tour focussed on the paleoseismology of the Borrega and Laguna Salada Faults, especially on the 1982 and 2010 surface ruptures, and took place fom 27 February to 2 March, 2014. You can download the detailed field guide and the road log here. more
Working on spatial data is the key feature of being a geoscientist and a lot of this work is done using ArcGIS from ESRI. QGIS was always an alternative especially looking at the costs of a full ESRI license. But when it comes to “making maps” QGIS was always behind ArcGIS in map formatting and export. The map composer was more or less … ugly and not state of the art. more
The INQUA Early Career Researcher inter-congress meeting will take place from 2 – 6 December, 2013 at Wollongong University, Australia. The meeting will bring together young earth scientists with a research focus on the Quaternary, from grad students to PostDocs. Thematic workshops on scientific writing and Quaternary science will be held and you’ll have the chance to discuss with colleagues fromn all over the world. The application deadline for travel support is 15 September, abstract submission and registration should be made before 1 October. There will be a Special Issue in INQUA’s journal Quaternary International in support of this meeting. This is a unique chance for ECRs, so spread the word and submit articles! more
From 14-18 October 2013 a field training course will take place in Central Argentina. The course and a workshop are organized by the Sam-GeoQuat Group, the topic is: “From the Pampean Ranges to the North Pampa: Tectonic and climatic forcing on the Late Quaternary landscape evolution of Central Argentina”. Deadline for registration is 30 August, so hurry if you are interested. Download the 1st circular (pdf, <1 MB) here: 1-course-sam-geoquat2013 more
This is a nice and short video performed by 9-10 year old kids and conducted by two teachers of the School “Escuelas Francesas” located at Sevilla (Spain), and in collaboration with our Spanish colleagues Miguel, Jorge and Pablo. The kids read about our work on earthquake effects on archaeological sites and they have reproduced in a easy way the main EAEs in the Roman buildings of Baelo Claudia: the aqueduct, the drop of the key stone in arches and oriented fallen columns. (EAE: Earthquake Archaeological Effect; see Rodríguez-Pacua et al., 2011). more
I came across this great initiative after Richard Styron sent the announcement via the Geotectonics mailing list. He’s currently maintaining these projects. The idea is to compile all available data on active structures in the Himalaya using the GitHub infrastructure (basically a collaborative platform for programming) . Everyone can join and help compiling active faults in this region. The data is then available to everyone for free in different data formats. The same thing is currently happening for the Andes region, too! more
In Mai 2013, Jim McCalpin’s field course on Field Methods in Neotectonics and Paleoseismology took place in Crestone, CO. Our friend Jack Mason from the Institute of Neotectonics and Natural Hazards of RWTH Aachen University took part and sent me this amazing video. They encountered a bullsnake in the paleoseismological trench! Surprisingly, the snake decided to climb out of the trench via the vertical wall. more
Today we went for field work again – mapping active faults in Northern Attica, trying to find out about offsets and slip rates, and scouting sites for applying Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) later. We found some very beautiful fault scarps and measured a good number of strike and dip values. At two locations we also recorded topographic profiles across the scarps in order to get an idea about the vertical offset. Combined with the assumption that these scarps are post-glacial, we can estimate slip rates. more
