Dear colleagues,

Please make sure to register for the 2020 PATA Days in Chile before 28 February here: https://www.patadayschile.cl

You can also book your hotels here and submit the short abstracts. There’s only a limited number of places due to the remote venue in a wonderful resort hotel – first come, first served. The PATA Days (Paleoseismology, Active Tectonics, Archaeoseismology) is the largest int’l meeting for the paleoseismology community and supported by INQUA. In Chile, a lot of tsunami science will of course also happen.

This is the first paper round-up of the year and I think it’s perhaps a new record. So many studies have been published, but maybe it’s just because nobody has done much in the last week of December. Whatever it is – there are some pretty interesting papers in the list. Tsunami biomarkers! Kaikoura EQ news! Historic EQs! New software! Ridgecrest & Palu! And so much more. Enjoy reading!

Klaus-G. Hinzen, Fabrizio Galadini, Shmuel Marco, Stathis Stiros, and Amanda M. Gaggioli invite contributions to an archaeoseismology session at the 37. Assembly of the European Seismological Commission (ESC) 2020, September 6-11 in Corfu, Greece. Deadline for abstract submission is April 12th 2020.

A Special Issue on continental strike-slip faults is planned in Mediterranean Geoscience Reviews, a new Springer journal: The 20th anniversary of the Eastern Marmara Earthquakes: Active tectonics of continental strike-slip faults

[…] continental strike-slip faults are complex structures on which the deformation is commonly distributed among a number of parallel to subparallel fault strands, making them in places significantly different in behaviour from their oceanic counterparts.

Thus, the goal of this issue is to publish a collection of high-quality papers on active tectonics of continental strike-slip faults around the globe using various disciplines, including but not limited to, tectonic geomorphology, paleoseismology, structural geology, crustal deformation, tectonic geodesy and seismology of continental strike-slip faults.

We hope you had a great start into 2020. May the new year bring exciting projects, secure funding, safe travels, and positive reviews. Quite a number of interesting studies have been published in the last few weeks, this is the latest paper round-up. Enjoy reading!

A recent study presented at the GSA meeting concludes that the UNESCO World Heritage site of Machu Picchu in Peru was intentionally built on faulted bedrock in order to ease the quarrying of the huge blocks used as construction material (Menegat, 2019). But has Machu Picchu seen big earthquakes in its lifetime? And if so, can it tell us something about their magnitude? After all, there are plenty of earthquakes in Peru, not only at the subduction zone but also in the Andes (e.g., Wimpenny et al., 2018). Some strong instrumental events occurred less than 100 km away from the Inca site. However, in the area of Machu Picchu we knew little about strong earthquakes. That’s why in 2016 a group of researchers from Peru, France, and the UK including myself started to investigate the active faults around Cusco and archaeoseismological damage to Machu Picchu and other famous Inca sites nearby in the CUSCO-PATA project.

These are the updated deadlines for the upcoming PATA Days in Chile, November 2020:

• Short abstract submission (300 words): 28 February, 2020
• Extended abstract (four pages as usual): 30 March, 2020
• Initial registration: 28 February, 2020
• Final registration: 30 March, 2020

The website with all the relevant information is here: https://www.patadayschile.cl/.

Here’s the updated 1st circular with the new deadlines (PDF):

Shopping is stressful, reading new papers is exciting. Why not lean back in your favourite comfy chair, enjoy a hot tea and see what’s new in paleoseismology and related fields? These are the latest papers on paleoseismology, earthquakes, and active tectonics.

The recent publication of a paper on the Weitin Thrust (Papua New Guinea) by Chen, Milliner and Avouac (Fig. 1) gave me the opportunity to dig out and look back to some notes I wrote few months ago. Chen et al. use optical image correlation to document coseismic surface ruptures along the Weitin Thrust occurred in a Mw 8.0 event in 2000 and in a Mw 7.7 event in 2019. The ruptures overlap along a 20-km long portion, with 3-4 m of slip (Fig. 2).

Text: Gösta Hoffmann with contributions by Michaela Falkenroth, Valeska Decker, Bastian Schneider and Christoph Grützner

“The beaches in Oman are pristine.” What sounds like an introductory sentence to a tourist brochure has scientific significance. Natural conditions without anthropogenic overprint are characteristic for vast stretches along the 1700 km coastline of Oman from the Strait of Hormuz in the north to the border of Yemen in the south. This situation allows geological research addressing Quaternary sea-level change on various timescales spanning from minutes to millennia. Over the last couple of years, we carried out research funded by the Omani Government and the German Research Foundation (DFG). Our findings are currently published in a series of papers (Schneider et al. 2018; Ermertz et al. 2019; Falkenroth et al. 2019, subm.; Hoffmann et al. 2020a, b) and are briefly summarised here.